The third chapter of the book continued on with planning and how to determine what needs to be done and how we’ll go about doing it. The author starts off by describing the 3 different types of projects that can be done including solo projects, small team projects (2-10) and large team projects (around 100 people). He also talks about some key points about determining who does what in a project and who’s responsible for determining what needs to be done.
To begin to find out what needs to be done, 3 elements must be looked at. The elements are the business perspective, the technology perspective and the customer perspective. Looking at these 3 different perspectives, there are many questions that have to be asked to help narrow down what a project entails and the best way to do that is find a balance between the 3. This will ultimately lead to a give and take system where you might have to give up an element in planning to appease another aspect. From there the author talks about the bad decisions that can be made during the planning process and how you should not go about planning. Finally, the author talks about different methods of collecting data to help determine the appropriate questions for the planning process. Overall, what I took from this chapter is that to plan, the right questions must be asked and that there are numerous aspects to look at.
I also spoke to my client today, and they took a look at my recent comps. I was very relieved that they really liked the new designs (the first comp in fact). We discussed a few minor changes to be made, but it seems that the biggest hump is now over (I have a hard time designing). This Tuesday coming up, I’m going to have the other pages of the website designed, shown to the client, and hopefully signed off to then begin production on the site. Everything’s looking up now, so thanks everyone for your help. I greatly appreciate it.