After numerous brainstorming sessions and meetings with staff, you are now ready to move your project into the development stage. Before your development team can get started, it needs to have all necessary information at hand to complete its project on time and to specifications.After numerous brainstorming sessions and meetings with staff, you are now ready to move your project into the development stage. Before your development team can get started, it needs to have all necessary information at hand to complete its project on time and to specifications. The development stage, just like all other stages of a project, depends on proper communication with the development team; the quality of communication between management and the development team will have a direct impact on the bottom line, and may help to maximizing the return on investment.

Communicating ideas to the development team is an ongoing procedure, and its foundation should be in written form. It doesn’t matter if you are outsourcing development or carrying out development in-house, writing the development documentation can be the most important step in the development process. Development documentation should be written in the project planning stage. Not only will this improve the communication between project management and the development team, but it will also assist in the planning stages, uncovering issues that may have been missed or could have the potential to slow down development.

Some companies use templates in order to provide their development teams with written information. This is a good solution for smaller projects such as banners or small programming changes. Such templates can also serve as a foundation for the documentation for larger projects. Technical documentation needs to contain certain common elements, depending on the project, of course. For example, technical documentation needs to define specifications, needed texts, example URLs, and any other such information that the development team will require.

Keeping the documentation informative yet simple can be difficult. The cover page should be left fairly plain, including only such vital details as company name and the author name(s) with appropriate contact information. Every time the document is edited, it should receive a unique version number. Version numbers do not have to be consecutive numbers – they merely need to communicate the state of the document when compared to other versions. Don’t forget the index so that the reader can navigate easier and more efficiently.

In the following pages of your technical documentation, all other information about the project and its development should be laid out. This information should be extremely detailed and include vital data such as the expected target audience, necessary loading speeds, operating system requirements, colors, and database structure. This is the crucial information which will make the difference between improving development or wasting resources. While good documentation will speed up and improve development, bad documentation can do the opposite.

Although getting started with a clear vision is important, the most important part of development is defined deadlines for completion of each stage of development. Most small and mid-sized companies fail to set deadlines. Those who do set one deadline (although this shows a good effort) usually find that one deadline is insufficient, depending on the project size. Your documentation should break the development process down into different stages, each with its own deadline.

Rewarding your development team for meeting deadlines may be a solution to moving development along as planed. Rewards do not need to be large. If you choose to reward deadline success with bonuses or other rewards, make sure to add mention of it in the development documentation.

Make sure to write a project summary after completion of the product. It should include issues that came up and how they were resolved. File the project summary together with the development documentation and project overview. It will serve as a good reference in the future and may help you learn and grow with your organization and its projects.

Kevin Kraft, a.k.a. Validus, serves as a moderator on the YNOTMASTERS message boards.