There have been plenty of blog posts made on the importance of the discovery phase of a project. I think Sidecar summed it up best when they said,

Discovery is “a defined, contractual engagement that allows us to properly scope and schedule a project, and allows our clients to feel confident that we’ll achieve their goals within the specified cost and timeframe. The more questions we can ask and answer up-front, the more likely it is that we can honor budgets, timelines, and our pipeline.”

At Engage, we view Discovery as an investment in the project; but more than that, it is an investment in our clients. Asking more questions up front, talking through potential roadblocks, and documenting a path forward all add up to a better journey to our end product. We fundamentally believe that the more time we spend in discovery the better the outcome of the project, the product, and our client’s success. We’ve also been under the belief that projects are completed sooner and with fewer road bumps. While we as a company share this belief, as Production Manager I look to data to drive decisions; so, I set out to see if the data supported our company culture.

Luckily at Engage, we have data at our fingertips and lots of it. We use Harvest to track our time and have built an in-house, proprietary product (more on that at a future date) to segment out tracked time into different phases of the project. This allows us to see a direct correlation between the amount of time in Discovery and the amount of time in QA (Quality Assurance).

Since each project has different priorities, there will be minor inconsistencies with every project; but overall, the data supports our belief. An investment in discovery pays off through the length of the project. It allows for a smoother, more streamlined process. It ensures there are fewer surprises for our clients and for our teams. And most importantly, it delivers a better product and experience for our clients.

Or to view it another way:

These charts show that when you do not spend time making decisions during discovery you end up making them after the final product is delivered for the client’s review. This leads to scope creep, unaligned expectations, and worse—a delay in the delivery of the project.

For most clients, the project’s deadline is their top priority and they’re willing to sacrifice things (e.g. rounds of revisions, functionalities) along the way to meet it. But, as we like to say here at Engage: forcing a timeline, forces a compromise. Our challenge is shifting the client’s focus off of the deadline and onto the proven process. We have found that clients who invest in discovery not only see their time more effectively used, but they also see their sites launch faster. The data tells the story: when we look at the time from the beginning of QA until launch, sites with more time in discovery can launch up to 3.25x faster. We see similar results for post launch QA as well; projects wrap up 3x faster when we invest more than 14% of the project’s overall time in discovery. This results in real savings for our clients; both in days and dollars.

But we won’t stop here. With data supported systems we can make informed decisions that benefit our clients and our internal teams. At Engage we have already started applying this data to our projects. We use it to steer our teams and to forecast accurate timelines for future projects.

Is there a point where there is a diminishing return? Can there be a project with too much time spent in discovery? We have yet to hit that point, but the data will tell us if we do. Until then, we will continue to put an emphasis on discovery. Because we believe that when we do, not only is our client’s experience better, but our internal process is too.