Prerequisites to Start a Project

In the previous chapter, we looked at aspects relating to preparing for a project. In case you skipped the chapter, we recommend going through it before reading this chapter. It is intended to do the preparatory work which will be put to effective use.

In this chapter, we focus on prerequisites for a project. Prerequisites are important for both the client and the consultant. This is the crucial link after your preparatory steps and before you start the actual work with detailed requirement gathering.

Similar to how one is supposed to look at prerequisites before installing software (to avoid installation failures), look at the prerequisites for a project below before starting.
The topics which we will cover in this chapter are:

• Understanding the business process
• Gathering requirements in brief
• Risk and mitigation plan
• Documentation
• Example

...

Understanding business process

In the previous chapter (Chapter 2, Preparing for a Project), we touched upon the importance of going through the client's website as a preparatory step. Completing this preparatory step will help you to get the details of how the client's business operates and help you understanding their business process easily.

Before we start, for readers who may be unfamiliar, business process is nothing more than the way a company functions to meet its business objectives. Every organization is formed with some purpose and is meant to achieve certain things. One of the definite objectives is making profits.

An organization can be big or small, and have its own way of doing business. If we take two companies, say A and B in a similar industry, it's quite likely that the way sales are done in Company A will be very different from the way they are...

Gathering brief requirements

The intention of writing this section is to make use of something which we call the brief requirement gathering. This is not to be confused with detailed requirement gathering, which we will be covering in the subsequent chapter.

We mentioned in the earlier chapter (Chapter 2, Preparing for the project) about the organizational hierarchy and the roles people play. We also mentioned that it's important to understand requirements at every stage of pyramid. This helps you achieve project success and also helps the adoption to go up substantially.

As you start meeting the stake holders at top layers of the pyramid, the amount of time they spend with you will go down as you go higher up the layers. The people on top of pyramids can help you drive adoption when they start using the software themselves.

The consultant must do this brief requirement gathering...

Brief project scope

We advise you to have a brief project scope template ready. This document will capture the requirements in an overview.

This document can then become a base for the detailed requirement gathering exercise. The document should capture the essence of the project, the objectives, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), and the input sources. This document also helps you to get a rough idea about the complexity of the project, the time lines involved, and what kinds of developers will be needed to execute the project.

A template similar to the one that follows can be considered:

Project Name: Give a name to the project.

Version History:
The table consists of the following details:

Version	Description	Created by	Date	Approved by
1.0	Initial Project Brief Document	<your name>	01-June-2017	<Approver name>
1.1

• Project objectives: Mention the project...

Planning risk and its mitigation

We have already stressed the importance of preparation, and in this chapter, we are focusing on the prerequisites. However well you may prepare, however strong your plan may be, things may change and give rise to risks.

A look at the following quote and you will know the importance of this subject:

If you've been in the software business for any time at all, you know that there are certain common problems that plague one project after another. Missed schedules and creeping requirements are not things that just happen to you once and then go away, never to appear again. Rather, they are part of the territory. We all know that. What's odd is that we don't plan our projects as if we knew it. Instead, we plan as if our past problems are locked in the past and will never rear their ugly heads again. Of course, you know that isn't...

Documentation

Documentation consumes significant time in a project and is often considered monotonous and boring. However, neglecting this aspect will prove detrimental to your project.

Documentation starts from preparatory steps and extends until go-live. Change management post implementation will call for additional documentation. In an earlier section, we went through the project brief. There are several other areas where documentation needs to be maintained. They need to be visited often. This helps you to notice anomalies and also helps you to identify risks.

Some of the areas where a consultant should maintain documentation are:

• Customer Info: This is your internal document, based on your study of the customer. Refer to earlier chapter (Chapter 2, Preparing for the project) and based on the information gathered from the website, stake holder's goals, nature of business...

Example

In this section, we will look at a small example and try to relate it with what was explained in the earlier sections. The names are not real but the scenarios will be real. We will look at an example of a retail chain.

AB Fashions LLC has approached you to get benefits from implementation of a BI project.

First step is to go through the website of AB Fashion LLC and get to know more about the company. Looking at the website, the following observations were captured:

• AB Fashions LLC is headquartered in London and has operations across multiple countries covering Europe, Asia, Latam, and Americas
• AB Fashions LLC is a fashion retail chain and caters to clothing and accessories for men, women, and children
• AB Fashions LLC is a B2C company and has an omnichannel model
• AB Fashions LLC is a large format retail with presence in premium malls, and also has an e-commerce website...

Summary

This chapter looked at various aspects that are prerequisites for starting a project.

It's tempting to jump into a project and start the work. However, a better approach is doing the ground work. We looked at the importance of understanding a client better. It's important to know the way business is done by your client and understand the flow of information as it occurs. Each function by itself is different and has its own way of working. We tried to briefly cover few of the functions which are early adopters, such as sales, finance, HR, and SCM.

Next, we looked at getting a broad overview of the project from senior stake holders. This ensures that you don't end up implementing a solution which is different from what the senior management is expecting.

Once you get the overview, document the same and get into the details with middle management. We also looked...