Discovery | Where do we even start?

Before we get into it

A brief recap of 2024. Acorn Interactive Inc. has been working iteratively over the past to enact new layers of the organization while fine tuning our mission as we go. We've known for a long time that having a phased contracting structure is the most sensible way for us to properly appraise our services, while providing the value our clients deserve.

In the past year, we've been perfecting the 5 w's of enacting a discovery-deployment process for every layer of our digital services.

To date, we've been able to:

Clear out a number of administrative debt issues, formerly blocking our ability to execute agile project management methodologies

Enact phased based project plans more formally that allow us to review our work collaboratively while setting clearer targets for scope and scheduling

Constructed monthly billing protocols to accelerate our revenue generation

Built a client reporting system for this monthly billing system that connects the dots between project payment milestones and the work being rendered

Continuing to implement internal, and external, project retrospective processes that allow us to find more efficient mechanisms for collaborating, and review work with clients to capture new ideas, field questions proactively, and use their feedback to build tailored systems.

This is why discovery is so important.

While it's great to learn in design and development, so much of this work can be thoroughly measured with communication, research, and above all context. This theme will emerge again across any number of client facing or technical posts we make, so let's get it over with:

In our field, context is everything.

Determining context unblocks every other layer of internal and client collaboration. Getting it right has been our goal for 2024. Performing discovery with our clients is how we translate an idea into a functional software system on JET FUEL.

What is discovery, and why do you need it?

You don't have to chat for long, or search the internet very far to learn about people reluctance to onboard consultants. Consultation, on the other hand, is the basis of discovery. As such, let's define it in our context.

Discovery for Acorn means:

Deeply understanding your vision

Translating your vision into software processes that are mapped to your objectives (sometimes there are tools that will solve, or enhance your objectives, other times you will need to have custom software built to serve them)

Diagramming processes to ensure they're going to be designed and developed with care (and context!)

Understanding the work that has been on, or for, an organization to date and what work needs to be done in planning to properly produce an implementation quote

Enacting user experience design to translate an organizations objectives, and turning them into a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that makes sense to the people using your systems

Using all of the steps above to properly communicate a creative and technical brief to our fulfillment teams in order to build out creative and technical specifications that can be scope, tracked, and tested throughout the Software Development Lifecycle

For us, it's a more comprehensive version of a very simple statement:

If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.

Let's get discovery right. Let's get excited about your vision, and work together to establish proper scope, specifications, and timeline. Let's also figure out what can, and should, be done in the short term so we can build iteratively, and adaptively for the future.

Sidenote:

We got this.