9. Transition: From Defining to Designing: Time to Visualize, Prioritize, and Plan

You now have a nice fat list of business requirements and user requirements. And you have information from your users to focus your discussions. So now what?

Unless you’re on the Shangri-la of projects, you’ll have a budget (tight), a timeline (crunched), or both that are telling you you’ll need to focus and manage that list somehow. This chapter discusses some of the ways you can transition from definition to design, including tactics to help your team visualize the solution that needs to be designed, prioritize features to create a unified set of requirements, and plan the design activities that will follow in the next phase of the project.

Carolyn Chandler

Chapter 4 touched on different project approaches, or methodologies, and how they affect the way you collaborate with the project team and business stakeholders. It compared a waterfall approach, which has Define and Design phases separated by an approval step, with a modified waterfall approach that has some overlap in phases.