How to get project discovery right
There's a step a lot of folks skip between being assigned a project and kicking off work: project discovery. In the project discovery phase, you're an investigator who's doing a background check for a project. You're figuring out why the project is needed, who's excited about it and who has concerns, and what's needed to get the project done well.
Thoroughly conducting project discovery will build buy-in with the folks on the project team and with folks impacted by your work, and ultimately prevent conflict and reduce mistakes in defining requirements and estimating needed resources. Let's walk through how to dig into the project from the beginning to avoid difficult surprises.
What's project discovery?
Projects aren't lists of tasks. Typically a stakeholder or leader will set out a goal for a project: an objective or business requirement that you're meeting by building a team to create new products, processes, or content and communication. Project discovery means establishing the purpose of the project and the stakeholder's vision for how it will be accomplished. This context will allow you to understand why a project is strategically important and help you make the right decisions or recommendations about project execution.
When you're assigned a project, you need to define three key pieces of information:
Goal: What elements do you need to produce or implement to call the project complete? How will this be measured?
Strategic context: What are the business reasons for the project? What priority or growth strategy does this project support? Sometimes asking these questions can reveal that a project is not a high priority.
Who needs to be involved: Making sure that everyone impacted by the project is involved from the beginning will help you build trust and buy-in, especially for large scale projects. Err on the side of including everyone in the discovery phase—you'll likely learn valuable context and unearth concerns you might not have discovered otherwise.
How do you tackle project discovery?
There's a simple approach to getting projects started on the right track: Ask questions. Too many project managers are afraid of looking uninformed and end up not asking enough questions. Or, they believe a project is important because it's important to them—but they go too quickly to understand that other stakeholders are not interested in participating. Building your map of the project landscape is how you'll successfully drive work forward.
Here are some of the questions you need to ask:
What company priority is this project supporting?
Is this project a priority for your team?
What metrics will you use to evaluate the success of this project?
What makes you concerned about this project? What keeps you up at night?
What team members are available to participate in this project?
What other priorities is this project competing with?
Dig into our project discovery questionnaire for a list of questions to help drive your project discovery.
Also, make sure you're asking the right questions of the right people. Keep a list of all the teams in the organization handy, and when you start a new project, go through it and think about any implications for each team. Of course, to reach that point you'll need a fair amount of institutional knowledge. If that's not possible at this point, ask the project owner/stakeholder to help identify points of contact in each department. Then you can meet with those folks, describe the project goal, and better define who needs to be involved.
Looking for more step-by-step guidelines for project management? Dig into our Project Management Guidebook.
