What is a Technical Project Discovery Process?
During the Pleiades Discovery Process, our team invests the time needed to understand your organizational goals, and how you want to be positioned within your industry.
Three Types of Discovery
The information that drives business is rapidly growing in complexity. To serve you best we isolate discreet components and address each separately. These are:
- Business Processes
- Information Flow
- Marketing and Sales
Business Processes
Mass-market software often requires you to alter your business to fit the software. The disadvantages of this are obvious.
We conduct our Business Process Discovery in order to learn the specifics of how you currently run your business and how you want to run your business. We then analyze the areas where custom automation can move you toward your goals.
Pleiades’ Business Process Discovery Sessions are comparable to consulting with an architect to draw up the design/construction plans for a building.
The goal of the Discovery Session and the Management Brief is to give you clear, accurate, information on which to make a sound business decision based on facts, not feelings. With the plans and cost in hand, you can make informed decisions.
Business Process Discovery Session Cost
Depending on the scale of the project, Pleiades’ Business Process Discovery Session usually requires between 5 and 10 hours. Discovery sessions are held at the client’s location and will necessitate the full commitment and participation of management.
Project Discovery Sessions with a complete management brief typically range from $2000 to $8000 – travel and lodging, if necessary, will be billed separately.
Information Flow
One of the hardest areas of any business for management to understand is the acquisition and flow of information through the organization.
Marketing and Sales
During our technical Discovery session, we work with you to analyze your competitors to ensure your site meets your ‘Industry Position’ goals. We also identify the kind and amount of both written and visual contented needed to meet your team’s stated goals for your new website.
In our experience, when the Technical Discovery process is skipped to accommodate budget restrictions, critical information isn’t communicated. This results in producing a substandard, poorly-planned website, that fails its mission. The Pleiades Services team wants to be proud of every site, and our clients delighted with the results their site project — so we insist that a Discovery phase be part of every website development site we agree to.
For a small to a mid-size project, you can expect a half day meeting (four-hours). For a larger more complicated site, plan for a full day meeting (eight-hours). One week before this meeting your team will receive the Pleiades Web-Project Discovery package. It will include forms to fill out and a meeting agenda. We ask that you and your team answer the questions to the best of your ability so we can use the team meeting time effectively and efficiently.
We have learned that the ‘content-first’ approach helps prioritize the content as the focus of the website. This approach gives the team key insights into what content currently exists, and what needs to be created. Itemizing the content helps you understand how the target audience will actually use the site. This valuable “User Experience” information will influence the design of the site.
Your Technical Discovery Session Deliverable
The Discovery deliverable is a technical brief. This project blueprint is the working document extrapolated from the client questionnaire, our initial meetings, Discovery interviews, team discussions, and site content strategy sessions. The Technical Brief outlines the project’s strategic roadmap, how users will interact with the site content, analytical data collected, a site map, a prototyped web design and a proposed production plan to achieve your goals. The technical brief informs and guides our work throughout the project and includes the project cost and timeline for the website project.
The Pleiades Discovery Sessions are comparable to consulting with an architect to draw up the design/construction plans for a building. With those plans and project cost in hand, you can make informed decisions on the project. At the end of the Pleiades Discovery Sessions, you own the project’s, Technical Brief. The Pleiades Development team can execute the plan for you, or you can choose to use the Technical Brief as a bid document to request proposals from other firms. After considering the cost/benefit analysis, your team may decide not to move forward on the project at this time. The goal of the Discovery Session and the Technical Brief is to give you clear, accurate, information on which to make a sound business decision based on facts, not feelings.
What Does Pleiades Services Charge for a Technical Project Discovery Session?
Depending on the scale of the project, the Pleiades Technical Discovery Session usually requires anywhere from 5 to 10 hours.
Project Discovery sessions held at the client’s location and will necessitate the full commitment and participation of the project management team. These Project Discovery Sessions with a complete technical brief typically range from $1000 to $7000 USD – travel and lodging, if necessary, will be billed separately.
Smaller or more remote can be conducted via Zoom Video Conference.
Here’s the best part — if in the end, you choose to have us execute the project for you, this discovery fee will be applied to the balance of the project.