Promote Writting Culture
Writing specs are all about driving critical thinking upstream in the development process the process gets you thinking holistically about your customer experience and designs up front, leading to better project outcomes, as well as the following benefits:
- Scales communication to team, new-hires, partners, & stakeholders and creates searchable record
- Increases quality by driving critical thinking up front
- Drives alignment by clarifying goals and design choices
- Enables cost & time estimates, by designing how the project will work at a high level end to end.
Principles
| Category | If Conditions | Audience | Then start to: | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project Charter | - Authorize projects - Pitch decks for leadership and partner teams |
- leadership - customer and partner teams - internal team |
Create a Project Charter - Create a Data Analytics specific Project Charter |
These should inform and provide partial input to PM spec and Func Spec |
| PM Spec | - Clarify the requirement with clear problems statement, stakeholders, goals and non-goals, high level solutions and success criteria, and open questions | - customer and partner teams - dev teams |
Create a PM Spec | Referenced by Func Spec. sometimes PM spec can include the functionalities directly |
| Func Spec | - Optional if requirement is not very complex - Ensure a systematic approach to the development of a new product or feature, - Describes the requirements for the interaction between the external users and the software system. |
- customer and partner teams - dev teams |
Create a Func Spec | is created after sign-off on the requirements (i.e. PM Spec) |
| Design Spec | - Programmatic design of the application under development. - Helps maintain the corporate technical knowledge base. - Become sales and marketing weapons. |
- dev teams | Create a Design Spec | Referenced by Test Spec |
Memo
Guide for memo writing
Memo is to convey high level thoughts or proposal. However, the writing guide and tips for memo writing also applies to spec writing.
Project Charter
Create a Project Charter
- Create a Data Analytics specific Project Charter