Part two “Exe­cu­tion” will give you a front-row seat in the mak­ing of a soft­ware design, so instead of pre-hashing what will be explained later on let me give you a cou­ple dis­tinc­tions con­cern­ing the con­cept soft­ware design phase. It is my expe­ri­ence that eighty to ninety per­cent to com­plete the con­tent of a soft­ware design will be done in this phase. What I mean with the con­tent of a design is the phys­i­cal doc­u­ment itself. After a soft­ware design is ready a lot of work will flow from it hav­ing to do with scope, test­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion like email­ing, meet­ings and so forth. But it’s this phase where the actual doc­u­ment will be brought to life.

“About ten per­cent of all resources will be nec­es­sary to com­plete this phase, another ten to fif­teen per­cent to com­plete all the work flow­ing from the con­cept design.”

These num­bers fig­ure as mnemonic devices to keep track whether or not you’re spend­ing too much or too lit­tle time mak­ing a con­cept design. How do you know that. As we will see the designer will be able to give an esti­ma­tion about the time nec­es­sary to real­ize a num­ber of require­ments in scope. This esti­ma­tion has to cor­re­late to the time it took to make the design as a whole. They’re noth­ing more than rough num­bers, but time esti­ma­tion is a hugely impor­tant part of soft­ware projects. The more because the time nec­es­sary to fin­ish some­thing is more often than not grossly underestimated.

Another thing about a con­cept design, cer­tainly when TDR, is that you have to real­ize that you pro­pose a visual appeal­ing solu­tion to a clients orga­ni­za­tional chal­lenge. Once the design is there you can’t “unmake” it. There’s no way you can undo somebody’s expec­ta­tion once it’s kin­dled. At one time I made a design about a cer­tain Google Earth solu­tion. That par­tic­u­lar design had 3D-modelling in it. That’s fancy and soft­ware projects don’t just help the client deal with his prob­lems, there’s image and pres­tige involved. I’ve men­tioned before that phases give project par­tic­i­pants ways to  man­age expec­ta­tions and this cer­tainly is one of those phases.

Related posts:

1. Soft­ware Project Phase 1.1: Draft­ing the Project Plan
2. Soft­ware Project Mile­stone #1: Scope Determination
3. Soft­ware Project Trait #5: Scope
4. Soft­ware Project Trait #7: Project Iterations
5. Soft­ware Project Trait #1: Hall Stand