Project Delivery

This is the part of a project where we 'onboard' our clients to the Zoocha ways of working, and agree how we can work together most productively moving forward. 

The foundation to any project, the onboarding phase gives both teams the chance to get to know each other, and understand how the project will be managed (including getting to grips with our project management tool, Jira).

The purpose of the Discovery phase is for us to gain a better understanding of the scope and requirements of a project. Typically this is managed through a number of workshops, depending on the scale of the project.

Typically, Discovery is used to:

• define the project team, and their roles and responsibilities

• understand corporate objectives

• identify user profiles and user needs

• flesh out key user journeys

• outline the proposed information architecture

• create a backlog of estimated epics and user stories

Sometimes referred to as 'Alpha', the Solution phase of a project involves activities such as prototyping and testing key user journeys, technical option appraisals and agreeing the creative direction.

This ensures that we are confident we are building the correction solution to meet the client requirements and their users' needs.

Key outputs of this phase are:

• a high level release plan - this includes an initial split of epics & user stories into sprints (usually 2 week timeboxes), to ensure that we can achieve any agreed milestones

• agreed definition of sprint ready

• agreed definition of done

• a breakdown of development tasks within user stories

The Development phase is broken down into sprints, usually 2 weeks long. To keep things simple, we work to a Zoocha sprint schedule across all of our projects, and all tasks are managed through our custom Jira workflow from inception -> in progress -> internal QA (of which there are multiple steps) and finally to client sign off.

Recurring sprint events in the schedule include:

• Sprint planning - held at the beginning of each sprint to agree the goal of the sprint and finalising stories included in the sprint 

• Daily scrums - held every day of a sprint for the project team to update on what they did yesterday, what they are planning to do today, and any blockers

• Backlog refinement & sizing - an opportunity for the development team to clarify any questions for stories in upcoming sprints, and associate an initial estimate in hours

• Sprint retrospective - held at the end of each sprint to identify what went well, any issues and what we can agree as actions to resolve identified issues in the next sprint