Checklist - Project Planning Questions

Project Planning Questsions Checklist

NOTE

This Checklist serves the purpose of providing a common suite of questions to ask when evaluating and generating a new project plan at No Clocks.

Taken from Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun, Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2008.

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Business Perspective

• Why is this project needed for our business?
• What unmet needs or desires do our customers have?
• What features or services might we provide that will meet those desires and needs?
• On what basis will customers purchase this product or service?
• What will motivate them to do so?What will it cost (people/resources)?
• Over what time period?
• What potential for revenue (or reduced organizational operating costs) does it have?
• Over what time period?What won’t we build so that we can build this?
• Will it contribute to our long-term business strategy or protect other revenue-generating assets? (Even nonprofits or IT organizations have a business strategy: there are always bills to pay, revenue to obtain, or revenue-generating groups to support.)
• How will this help us match, outflank, or beat competitors?
• What are the market time windows that we should target for this project?

Technology Perspective

• What does it (the project) need to do?
• How will it work? How will each of the components in it work?
• How will we build it? How will we verify that it works as it’s supposed to?
• How reliable, efficient, extensible, and performant are the current systems or ones we are capable of building? Is there a gap between this and what the project requires?
• What technologies or architectures are readily available to us? Will we bet on any new technologies that will be available soon but are not available yet?
• What engineering processes and approaches are appropriate for this team and this project?
• What applicable knowledge and expertise do our people have? What won’t they be working on to work on this project?
• How will we fill gaps in expertise? (Train/hire/learn/ignore and hope the gaps magically go away.)
• How much time will it take to build, at what level of quality?

Customer Perspective

• What do people actually do? (Not what we think they do or what they say they do.)
• What problems do they have trying to do these things? Where do they get stuck, confused, or frustrated?
• What do they need or want to do but aren’t able to do at all?
• Where are the specific opportunities to make things easier, safer, faster, or more reliable for them?
• What design ideas for how to improve how the thing should work—in terms of what people actually do—have the most potential for improving the customer experience?
• How can those ideas be explored? What prototypes, sketches, or alternatives need to be investigated to help us understand the potential for the project?
• What core ideas and concepts should the project use to express information to users?

Interdisciplinary Questions

• Why does this project exist? Why are we the right people to do it? Why does it need to be done now?
• What are the three or four useful groupings we can use to discuss the different kinds of customers we have? (For example, for a word processor, it might be students, professionals, and home users. For an IT database, it might be sales, receptionists, and executives.) How do their needs and behaviors differ?
• What demographic information can help us understand who these customers are? (Age, income, type of company, profession, education, other products owned or web sites used, etc.)
• Which activities is each user group using our product for? How does this correspond to what they purchased the product for? How does this correspond to how we marketed the product? What problems do they have in using the product to satisfy their needs?
• Who are our potential new customers, and what features, scenarios, or types of products would we need to provide to make them customers? (What are the demographic profiles of these new customers?)
• Do we have the technology and expertise to create something that satisfies these needs and problems? (For each identified need, answers of yes, maybe, and no can often be sufficient, at least as a first pass.)
• Can we build the technology and obtain the expertise to create something that satisfies these needs and problems? (Yes, maybe, no.)
• Are there significant opportunities in a new product or line of products? Or are the needs tied directly to the current product or line of products?
• Are there viable business models for using our expertise and technology to solve these identified problems or needs? (Will profits outweigh costs on a predictable timeline?)
• What are the market timelines for the next release or product launch? Which windows of opportunity make the most sense to target?
• What are competitors in this marketplace doing? What do we think their strategies are, and how might we compete with them?

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Appendix

Note created on 2024-04-09 and last modified on 2024-04-09.

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LIST FROM [[Checklist - Project Planning Questions]] AND -"CHANGELOG" AND -"03-AREAS/Checklists/Checklist - Project Planning Questions"

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