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Integrated Solutions: Part 3 – Project Engagements, Process, Best Practices and Implementation

July 8th, 2010

Information Architecture, Project Management, User Experience Design

NavigationArts has extensive experience in Web-enabled solutions.  Our engagements span from strategic consulting services to design, development and implementation.   Generally, for the purposes of best practice and process discussion, I group some of our offerings into four major categories:

1. Web Strategy
2. Strategy to Presentation Layer Design (Information Architecture and Visual Design)
3. Strategy to Technology  Implementation
4. End to End Integrated Web-Enabled Solutions

Regardless of the scope of engagement, User Experience should be at the foundation of every project.  User Experience Design (UXD) is based on Architecture, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Technology and Content Strategy.  Because this work inherently is conducted across several disciplines and often incorporates members from multiple teams (such as the NavigationArts’ team in conjunction with client teams), it is imperative to have repeatable, traceable, and auditable processes as well as best practices in place.  Incorporating best practices into these disciplines ensures that you can reconcile business goals, platform constraints and user needs in order to create a UXD that is valuable, credible, scalable and maintainable.

One of my daily, evangelical discussions is around requirements gathering. In my opinion, it is vital to get all disciplines involved up front, whenever possible, in order to gather the business, functional, and technical requirements for a project.  The value of engaging in this type of task early is to set the foundation/expectation for delivering appropriate solutions.  Realistically, this may not be a possibility for all projects for many reasons; however, it is a critical success factor.

While understanding the limitations of each project (scope, budget, and time) is essential and sometimes non-negotiable, projects can slip off track for several reasons.  It is significantly important to leverage efficiencies and to practice strong Project Management. Planning, communication and partnering are important skills for every team member.  Our approach incorporates industry standard project life cycle phases ranging from Research and Analysis to Maintenance and Support.  Each phase has guidelines around services, tasks and deliverables that help keep the projects on target, within budget and within schedule.  In addition, it is important to employ a strong change management process that is informed by project management and ensures transparency of our work.

The main objective of following a well thought out and effectively communicated process is a successful project.  Inherently, everyone wants this objective but sometimes, it’s very difficult to practice and implement detailed process and best practices in projects that are tightly scoped and scheduled.  For this reason, it is essential to follow a Project Plan, understand the tasks that are not only involved in each phase of the project but also inform the final deliverables.  This is a best practice at NavigationArts, and thus, a repeatable, traceable, and auditable  process becomes a reality.

See my previous blogs on Integrated Solutions: Part 1 – Architects of the User Experience and Part 2 – Why User Experience Design is Important

Erica Milkovich-Padilla