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Perhaps because the web is a "presentation layer" entity for users, people tend to think of the web in terms of design. Web pages in fact live in the real world on real computers and we need them to do real work.

Establishing the global scope of your project up front is key to successfully modeling solutions. You can't afford to miss anything. dataSpheric represents top notch Arizona Project Management. Our experience teaches us to be thorough.

This document is a checklist type of sheet used up front in early-on meetings to determine the global scope of your web enabled software project or website. We obviously don't answer every question here on every web design project or even dynamic website design but it's nice to know you haven't forgotten anything. The project initiation document is usually filled out by hand in a face to face interview or over the phone. It frequently becomes the first piece of project documentation.

dataSpheric: We're more thorough than your Phoenix web development shop because we've done this before. Corporate or enterprise-scale web-enabled software solutions demand the highest level of planning and foresight.

Web Project initiation document

© 2000-2004 dataSpheric

  1. Date:
  2. Organization:
  3. Department:
  4. Primary contact:
  5. Whose initiative is this?
  6. Who will act as project director?
  7. Budget-preproduction?
  8. Budget-Production?
  9. In-house or out of house?
  10. Functional, Weak Matrix, Balanced Matrix, Strong Matrix, Projectized, Composite (circle one)
  11. What need does this project seek to serve?
  12. How was this need identified?
  13. What does it need to do?
  14. Mission critical?
  15. Time sensitivity:
  16. Factors inducing time sensitivity
  17. Workflow/ process flow evaluation performed?
  18. Best-practices evaluation performed?
  19. Are there any other 'templates' that exist in other companies/industries?
  20. Have the users had an opportunity to input?
  21. Natural ally/natural enemy evaluations-in house and out of house?
  22. Will it be informational?
  23. Will it do commerce?
  24. How does it produce revenue?
  25. Is it's product physical? Electronic? Data?
  26. Who is the user?
  27. Where is the user?
  28. When is the user?
  29. How is the user interfacing with this system?
  30. What are use case scenarios?
  31. How important is user acquisition?
  32. How important is user retention?
  33. How important is search-engine optimization?
  34. What are most important search engines?
  35. What will make this a good site in user terms?
  36. What will make this a bad site in user terms?
  37. What will make this a good site in administrative terms?
  38. What will make this a bad site in administrative terms?
  39. With what other departments does it interact?
  40. What is the chain of dependency vis-à-vis other business systems?
  41. What is the content?
  42. Where will the content come from?
  43. Will the content require management?
  44. Will content be dynamically or statically delivered to user?
  45. Is rollback necessary?
  46. Is version control necessary?
  47. What are the PR requirements?
  48. What are the marketing requirements?
  49. What are legal exposures/requirements?
  50. Risk analysis?
  51. What are the failure scenarios (hotspots)?
  52. CBA performed?
  53. What kind of ROI is expected?
  54. Will it require RDB?
  55. Where will the data come from?
  56. How much data (order of magnitude)?
  57. Is the data date sensitive?
  58. Is the data guaranteed/verified?
  59. What functions/operations must be performed on the data?
  60. What are ongoing database requirements?
  61. What data will be entered by users?
  62. What will the system do with this data?
  63. What data will be returned to the user?
  64. Does it require a 'backend' administrative interface?
  65. What sort of ongoing maintenance resources will be required?
  66. Will the 'work' performed for the user be distinct or ongoing?
  67. Will the system require session-awareness?
  68. Will the system be required to remember user info?
  69. Will the system need to be aware of user state?
  70. Will the system need to be aware of user agent?
  71. Is there a shipping component?
  72. Is the shipping component ready to go?
  73. Shipping-tracking?
  74. Shipping-billing and invoicing?
  75. Hit counting, traffic analysis requirements?
  76. Performance evaluation requirements?
  77. Security requirements:
  78. Will training be required for users?
  79. What level of testing is required, who will perform it?
  80. Will this result in intellectual property? Patentable? Copyright?
  81. Trademark protection?

As you can see, not every question will be appropriate to your project. Some questions are best asked in an indirect manner out of diplomatic concerns such as the "natural enemy/ally" set which probes "corporate politics" as a potential threat to project success. I'd recommend writing or typing in "NA" for "Not Applicable" for those questions so you know at a glance they weren't overlooked. Not everyone has what it takes to be a successful Phoenix web site company or to manage a technology project but tools like these can sure help you understand what you are getting into ahead of time.