The planning phase of web development has always been overlooked but yes there might be companies who have learnt from their share of mistakes and included planning and brainstorming in the initial stages of web development. This is the phase that sets tone for vision with both the client and web development team achieving common grounds on ideas, the scope of the project is set and the procedures of different phases of development are decided which later fruition in the form of a perfect project.
During the planning stage of the project, the project manager defines exactly what he and his team are planning to achieve and how they will achieve it. The ideas go back and forth and at the end of this stage client can feel satisfied as he/she knows what to expect from the outcome. There are times during this stage when the client is not able to express his ideas or not able to give a proper insight, but an experienced company or the managers are still able to get the gyst out of what was explained and what exactly the client is looking for. This helps in understanding the underlying business goals of a project. There are some agencies that spend almost 50% of the scheduled deadline to deliver the project during this phase because they know that actual development process will not take as much of time that would have wasted in creating or recreating the designs or developing the code if this planning phase was not there.
Certainly, there will be clients too who would want to skip this planning phase saying that either they have already created the wireframes or did the planning phase or they would say that it is a sheer waste of time. At such times, it is vital that the project managers or the agency persuades the client to invest proper time in the planning phase to establish a common baseline for the project intentions, content needs so that the kind of content that the client foresees- will it be able to fit in the design that client wants and strategy.
The Benefits Of Planning
#Delivering the Project on Time
Planning will not only streamline the production, but will also save money for the agency for every hour less its developers work on the project and the client will be happy to see the speed of delivery. The tasks and various development phases were defined by the project manager in the planning phase and now the tasks were pre-defined and the team knows what they have to do. So the chance of revisions of the work and miss-communications did not cost any of the parties involved.
#The Client Receives More than he expected
The end product was greatly improved because not only the managers understood what the client was expecting the outcome of website but also the designers can come up with more creative ideas that were in the context of the client’s needs and aligned well with them.
Not only the accuracy of the project was met but the client gets surprised by the efficiency of the work. Supposedly, let’s say the client required some decent graphics to be put up on the homepage of the website that explains what all the company provides, but in the same cost the designers come up with a little animation that it explains it lot better and is in accordance with the client’s liking.
#Better Relationship between the Client and the Agency
This is the ultimate result of the planning phase because the scope of the project was agreed upon by both sides and if the client desires that something more could be included that is related to the scope of the project but was not in discussion in the planning meet, the agency gets ample time to understand the requirement, execute it and satisfy the client because the project met its proper deadline or even before the date it was supposed to be finished. This makes the client happy that the agency delivered something more within the same or added cost that he expected and the agency does not incurs any loss. The client might even refer the agency to other prospects.