Brainstorming process
I like to move quickly past the blank slate stage of a project. You get a sense of momentum which builds even more momentum and the energy is contagious. People feel like there’s value right at the beginning. You get a shot at shaking the perception people have that IA or documentation is slow and cumbersome, not compatible with agile, or a barrier to producing the end product. OK– here’s my thing about the argument about against documentation: it’s NOT ABOUT THE DOCUMENTATION! It’s about the process you go through, the questions you ask, the healthy debate you engage in. It forces you to think and plan. In my mind, committing something to a document is more a mental checklist, making sure you’ve dotted your i’s and all that. What sells me on continuing to do it is that I always catch something I hadn’t considered. I see pitfalls sooner, I know what we need to work out ahead of time so nothing sneaks up and surprises us mid-project. All that, plus it’s easy to share, and to refer back to later, and if I ever get hit by a bus…

Collaborative approach
So I said it’s not about the document, it’s about the process: if I had gone and whipped this up by myself and presented it to my team and said, “okay, go!” it would have a high risk of failure. They wouldn’t feel ownership or commitment, or a shared sense of momentum. What made it work, and what kept this document in the forefront of our subsequent conversations for the following months of the project, was that we did it together. Sappy, but true. In this particular case, our team included the designer, developer, strategist, and me. I would absolutely include a client in this process too, if the relationship were right. In this case, the project was our vision, we were bringing it to the client, so we did it without her. If it were her idea that we were executing, she should have been there. A strategic brief had been prepared and approved in advance, so we knew the big picture already. We started by reviewing and discussing the strategic brief, and when talk turned to potential feature sets, we grabbed the sticky notes and started brainstorming. When new ideas stopped getting scribbled down, we went through as a group, collected duplicates together, and discussed the meaning of everyone ideas.

Prioritization Process
We then collaboratively mapped the ideas on a chart, ranking by feasibility and importance. I can’t explain why it works, but the act of everyone physically positioning the sticky notes on the page is important, it invites participation. It’s not original, lots of people use this method, but I’m sticking with it because it works. Once we had a rough first draft done, we segmented the chart into the categories: do first, do next, put off until later, and reconsider. Once we had the categories, we reviewed as a group, to answer some critical questions.

• Does the first release make sense?  Does it paint a complete picture of a compelling product?
• Is everything in the first release critical in an initial offering?
• Are there any dependencies that would bump lower priorities up?

How it lives on
We knew that our Do First segment is where we would focus our energy for design, but kept the Do Next phase in mind, so we could plan a development framework that would accommodate the localization, for instance. We recognized that things could change as we moved through the project, the important thing was to make sure that the changes matched the strategic vision and kept a tight story around the product being built. Things moved out of the Do First phase when we decided they weren’t truly critical. As the development environment changed with new software releases, things we planned to build became unnecessary, and dropped off our list. As each release is completed, the priorities are reevaluated, providing direction on where the team should be spending their time. This chart serves as a high level scope overview document to quickly communicate priorities, keep the team in sync, and as an effective reminder not to waste energy on lower priority future phases until those phases are near enough to begin planning. Nothing is left out, lost, or forgotten, everyone’s ideas are heard and accounted for, and there’s a plan in place to evaluate next steps after the top priorities are completed.