There’s often a ‘just go’ ethos in tech design and development projects, and as a result strategic planning can fall by the wayside. Budgets just don't have the time or space for it.
Unfortunately, it’s a recipe for projects to fall behind, with a finished product that is neither what customers need nor what stakeholders want.
Fortunately, strategic planning can fix these problems by:
- Getting all the stakeholders on the same page
- Clearly articulating exactly what’s in scope (and what isn’t)
- Keeping projects moving forward, so they finish on time and on budget.
Let’s look at these in a little more detail.
Getting all stakeholders on the same page
This is easier said than done in a lot of enterprise companies. Stakeholders are everyone from department heads, to internal IT and maintenance crews, to the actual end users.
All of these groups need to be consulted, so that from the outset there’s a clear understanding of objectives, and actionable ways to measure the success or failure of those objectives.
For example, say a business is redesigning their website. Strategic planning will:
- Establish what the problem is that the redesign is trying to solve
- Establish what the website is actually going to do, and the KPIs to see if it’s working
- Establish a clear ROI, and how that's going to be achieved
- Clearly articulate what parts need to be completely reworked (based on stakeholder interviews) and what parts are fine
These are all issues that, while they probably won't be solved in a strategic planning document, they will be addressed and articulated that in a way that everyone understands what they’re trying to do.
What’s in scope (and what’s not)
This is a tremendous challenge for any team, but an internal team in particular. It’s hard as a team leader of, say, a development team, to tell the VP of a company that no, that’s not in scope.
But for a lot of projects, that’s exactly what has to happen.
Strategic planning gives everyone a clear understanding of the goals and objectives of a project, and some ideas on how they’re going to achieve them, so that when a new idea is suggested four months into development, there's something concrete to refer to. Like a rough sketch of the entire project, from the very beginning.
Imagine that a company is designing an enterprise level app and one of the stakeholders decides that they want an entirely customized iconography set.
Strategic planning provides:
- Blueprints for the project to refer to
- Goals and objectives agreed to by all the stakeholders of the project
With these two things, it’s much easier to evaluate if new icons will enhance or detract from the project timeline and the ability to achieve the outlined objectives.
Sometimes, ideas late in the game are what make projects amazing. But sometimes, that’s just not the case.
Strategic planning helps tell the difference.
Strategic planning keeps everyone on track
Web and app design, development and launches are long, complex projects. They often involve different vendors and they always involve different teams. Strategic planning provides the structure for all these different moving parts to exist in, so that even after months of work everyone knows where they are and where they need to be.
It prevents teams from getting lost in the weeds.
This challenge is magnified in digital products because the deliverables needed are contingent on each other.
For example:
- Development is contingent on design
- Rapid prototype testing is contingent on development getting a working prototype up and running
- Content writers needs a shell to know what they’re writing for (provided by both design and development)
That's not to say these teams can’t work without each other, but the end result is much better with close team integration.
A strategic planning phase gives everyone something to reference, so that they all know what other teams are doing. It reduces the gaps between hand-offs, confusion over deliverable times and expectations, and will generally make a project go smoother, faster, and more cost effectively.
At the start of a project, when everyone is all ideas and no one’s lost in the trenches, strategic planning feels like something for other people. But in fact, that’s when it’s needed most.
By mitigating project and team friction and frustration, by creating clear goals and objectives that everyone agrees on, and by defining exactly what’s going to be worked on in this project, strategic planning saves time, money, and a lot of stress on the project managers.
What more could you ask for?
