E-Marketing Professionals

Do solid up-front homework before the project proceeds to development
The up-front homework—the tasks that precede the actual development phase—is vital to success. Projects that feature solid up-front homework more than double their success rates. There are major differences between successful and unsuccessful projects in quality of work, most notably in the homework, or predevelopment, stages. These stages include the preliminary assessment, market research, and business analysis.

• First, homework improves the chances for success. There is strong best-practices evidence to support this.

• Second, homework actually reduces time to market. This is because good predevelopment work means that the project definition or specs are accurately stated. One of the greatest time wasters in development projects is that the service specs keep changing. This is analogous to trying to score a goal when someone keeps moving the goalposts.

• Third, homework done early allows you to anticipate problems before they become expensive or hard to fix. The worst time to he making changes to a service or to a system is when the new service is rolling out into the market-place

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