Whether you are experienced in project management and simply looking for some tips to implement your next plan or you are trying to develop an understanding of what all exactly goes into the project planning process, it is important to establish a direction. A project plan can take minutes or months to complete. A project plan can be viewed as a roadmap with points that indicate each step in the process of project completion. This roadmap can tell you how you should get from point A to point B. If you continue reading, you can learn about planning your next digital project as efficiently as possible.

Brainstorm your idea:

During the first phase of your digital project, it is important that you balance all of your ideas and options. Key questions to address are

• Is the market you are striving to meet a good fit for both your goals and your project?
• Is your service or product addressing a specific need in the market?
• Is your digital project financially and operationally feasible? Are your projected results realistic?

Consider any negative aspects or possible threats that your project could entail.

What needs to be done?

Now that you have a solid idea for your digital project, it might be helpful to create a statement of work. This document can indicate the steps you need to take, the materials you need to gather, and everything you need to achieve before declaring project completion. It will be useful to have

• A list of tasks with deadlines and costs
• Dependencies among those tasks
• The responsible person/entity for each task

There are also useful tools you might use to manage your work, like ASANA or Microsoft Project.

Executing the statement of work:

Once you have completed the initial phases of scoping out the work ahead of you, the creative aspect of planning your digital project has begun. If you are working in a team, make sure everyone agrees with your roadmap. Take input from each team member and consider each of their unique experiences in design and technology. Planning should include the following:

• Develop some specifications you would like to see included in the design.
• Clearly define the audience
• Define the architecture of your digital project
• Define the technology for both front ends, back-end, and apps. Make sure you select the technologies that best fit your project because changing the technology during the project can be painful.
• Define the initial and future features for your digital product/service, and a phased technology roadmap to implement them
• Define the testing approach. Typically for a complex project, a testing environment is created to test the new digital product/service

Implementation & Testing:

Don’t be afraid to point out aspects of the drafted project you don’t agree with if you are working in a team. And if a team member does not agree with you, don’t be offended. It is always important to revise, revise, and revise again. Since you are creating a digital project, be sure that all of your features are operating correctly. Test your project before you send it out. Test the usability on different devices before making it available to the public.

 Performing Maintenance:

As soon as you deliver your completed project, the maintenance and operational phase will begin. Be sure that you plan a timeline for checking in with your project to ensure continued accessibility. There can always be room for improvement, and you should plan ways to improve functionalities of your product and support your offer to users. The new functionalities should be included in the technology roadmap, in order to monitor execution and ensure coherency in the overall project. Each new functionality should be managed as a new project including the planning execution and testing phase

One of the most important aspects to remember is stability. Make sure that your digital project is stable in operations.

Beginning a digital project requires a lot of attention to detail regarding design, technology, timelines, and determine the affordability of the selected technologies and team members, and validate the expected financial results. Starting a digital project can be a great way to test your creativity or simply learn a little bit more about technology.

Serviis.com can provide access to graphic designers, editors, app designers developers, website developers and designers to support your new digital project, but also to consultants and marketing specialists.