Project objectives and methodologies

Project objectives and methodologies are a key part when you want to kick off the project. It is important for the project itself and for our team, because as a team we want to know the clear goals of this project, its importance, the approach that we will use, and much more.
Usually, this part has to be defined by our UX leader, or, in most cases, by a project leader, but it is really important for us to understand this too.

Usually, when we start a project, we must schedule a meeting with the full team, where we give a general overview of the project to the entire team, and by the end of the meeting, we answer the following questions:

• What is the importance of this project to our company?
• How will stakeholders determine the project's success?
• What approach or methodology we will use during the development of this project?
• What is the project timeline, which resources will we be using, and who will be involved in this?
• Do we have any pending information that we need from the client or stakeholder or any other requirement that is necessary before kicking-off the project?
• And always be ready to add new requirements that might appear during the development process that we were not able to recognize in the first discovery phase.

So, your goal for this meeting or session is to have clear objectives for the project.

If you find that the objectives are unclear and some parts will prevent us from starting the project, then we can help the project team understand the business-related context of the project by holding a workshop with them.

Then, during the workshop, we can let them know about the missing part for the project to start, the company's weakness and its strength, and more importantly, your approach, as a UX team, to the project.

Understanding the approach or methodology of a project is a really important part. The project methodology can depend on many things, for example, the structure and location of the project team, the technologies that will be used in the project, and the teams that will be involved in it. Defining this is a project-management responsibility, but it is really important for us–as a part of the UX team–to fully understand the methodologies that we will use for our product; for example, it might be the Waterfall approach, the Agile approach, or some other project-management approach. The main thing is for us to understand the approach so that we will have a clear idea of how to start the UX process and align with other team members, project-management teams, and the client themselves.

Their differing viewpoints and opinions will spark the team's creativity. Don't be afraid to switch members between projects.

Now that we're clear on the discovery and planning phase, we can move on to the second phase of the UX process, which is strategy.