A new Approach for Improving Estimations with Content Discovery Workshops

The Discovery phase is the foundation of any technology project. During this process we can understand the project from the perspective of the stakeholder and bring everyone together with a common understanding before diving into Drupal.

Ideally, our Discovery phase will generate a backlog of user stories that we can prioritise based on their value to the end user and start planning how we can meet these requirements.

However, with Drupal projects (or content projects in general) its easy to fall into a trap where user stories don’t map easily to the tasks or capabilities of the system. This is when estimation becomes less accurate - especially when some stories appear to be “0 points” because the functionality is “out of the box”.

In this session, we’ll present the idea of a Content Discovery Workshop - which starts with the assumption that the value in the project is the content itself and not the technology that delivers.

In addition we can extend this workshop concept to Personalisation - so that we can gather all of the unknowns together with confidence.

Taking this approach to discovery helps the tasks required for estimation more accurately match the business goals - and also works as a checklist to make sure no area has been missed.