Discovery Project
Overview
Section titled “Overview”When clients come to Lab651 for project development, they have a wide range of level of preparedness in terms of their ideas and designs. Some clients will come with a fully fleshed out product and need Lab651 to implement what is already designed. And, some clients will come with a nebulous idea and have no idea where to begin. And, every so often, a client comes to us to ask us to analyze and document and existing product. Every client falls in to that range somewhere.
For new product development, a Discovery Project should be proposed to clients that come to Lab651 and don’t really know what they want or do not have a solid design. And, they are not capable, themselves, to get to a point where we can quote from requirements. A rule of thumb is: if the client cannot produce requirements, then we should propose a discovery project. The delivery of the Discovery Report should include enough specificity to quote the entire MVP product.
For existing product analysis, a Discovery Project will encompass the outcomes that the client desires. For example, Lucky Duck came to Lab651 and asked us to analyze their E-Caller that is actively being built and programmed overseas. There were several long-standing bugs and the client wanted us to figure out how we would fix them. In this process, we mapped the hardware, the software and the file system. The delivery of the Discovery Report included all of that information as well as a quote fixing the issues. The Discovery Report for Lucky Duck can be found here.
Quoting
Section titled “Quoting”Even a discovery project needs to be quoted. The process of quoting a discovery will include exposing the Lab651 team to the project and ask how much time they feel they would need to pin-down requirements so that a quote can be created. A representative of every skillset that the product might use should be included. The engineers will benefit by hearing the client’s voice and the client’s description of the project, so the team should be brought in as soon as a discovery is deemed necessary.
For additional information on Estimation go here.
Discovery Report
Section titled “Discovery Report”Each Discovery Report will be tailored to the client’s needs. The various parts that can be in a Discovery Report are outlined in the Report section here.
Presenting the Discovery Report
Section titled “Presenting the Discovery Report”When presenting the final Discovery Report to the client, go through the document interactively in the meeting (the client should be sent the report before the meeting). The meeting should include the engineers that work on the project. If the engineers want to, let them present the sections that they worked on. If the client asks questions or wants clarificaiton in the document, make those changes directly in the document.