What is the Clear vision and why is it important?

What is the Clear vision and why is it important for software development?

Our company is interested in creating digital products that would be useful for our clients. So, analytics is the first step in our project work. At this stage, we identify the client’s business goals, test business hypotheses, create lists of product requirements and features, and estimate the project budget. What tools do we use when analyzing the project?

Analysts in Ronas IT implement 2 tools - impact maps and a list of user stories. Using them, we connect the functions of the future app to the client’s business aims and estimate the project budget and deadline. But how do these 2 tools help us to create a site or an app useful for our client? After implementing these 2 tools our analyst forms the Clear vision - a document that describes product requirements and includes a project estimate. We attach it to the contracts that we sign with clients. In this article, we will tell our readers what Clear vision is and how we use it when working with projects. This article will be interesting for startups and businessmen who want to automate an already existing business but don’t have a detailed vision of the future product.

Ronas IT is a company that creates digital solutions for small businesses and startups. Our work approach is based on business analytics and agile-based development. We have already been on a market for 15 years and helped our clients to launch more than 400 successful projects in the fields of fintech, team management, business automation, and delivery.

What is the Clear vision?

The main goal of the Clear vision is to provide the project team and their client with a common vision of the product. Clear vision is the document that describes product requirements taking into account the client’s business features. This document looks a bit like a contract: it describes the service that an IT company plans to provide to the client.

What does the Clear vision consist of?

In Ronas IT this document has three parts:

• List of user stories
• Budget and deadline estimate
• Understanding the problem section

You can find detailed information about user stories and estimate in the articles that are already published in our blog. What is Understanding the problem?

Understanding the problem

At the stage of analytics, we try to find answers to the following questions:

• What is the idea behind the product?
• How can we turn it into a viable product?
• How much will it cost?

To answer these questions and create a product that matches our client’s aims, we collect some information about his or her business. Our analyst and a client arrange one of the online analytical sessions. During this session our analyst asks several questions and finds the information about the following aspects:

• About the business: what industry does the client work in? What products does the client produce or what service provide? Why are these products and services useful? How does the client make money?
• About the most acute business challenge at the moment: what aims does the company want to fulfill? How does the company want to change its workflow?
• About solutions that the client expects from us: what service should we provide? How will this service affect the company’s workflow?
• About expectations: in what form does the client want to receive our work? What are the deadlines? What are these deadlines connected with?*

By answering these questions, we understand what our client’s business goal is and what software solution is required to achieve this goal. We use this information to create the list of user stories and the list of product features. Below there is an example of Understanding the problem that we created for the owner of a fitness club network.

What is the difference between the Clear vision and Software requirements specification?

Why did we create our own format of the final document if the software requirements specifications already exist? Why don’t we use it?

When working on the project, we use agile-based methodologies - we work in sprints and first create a minimum viable version of the product, and then refine it. Clear vision is the document that matches agile-based methodology. While SRS is a document used in the waterfall model that we don’t implement in our workflow. What are the benefits of our approach?

First of all, the Clear vision provides that both the client and the development team have the same vision for the future product. In this document, the app features are described in the form of user stories. Each user story is written with the use of simple language without complicated technical terms. The analyst discusses each list item with the client. Thus there is a greater chance that our client will get the product that matches his or her expectations.

Secondly, it takes less time to develop the Clear vision than to write an SRS. The Clear vision can be created in a short period of time from several days to a week. While the processes of creating SRS and developing an app can be equally long. Also, during the period of creating SRS, the client won’t have even the design mock-up that he or she can show to the project stakeholders.

Finally, the Clear vision takes into account the business goals of the client. SRS is a huge mass of text that describes the future product. It doesn’t analyze the client’s business aims and the company’s business features. While the Clear vision includes the Understanding the problem section that helps us to understand how the digital product will change the client’s business. But when the SRS is used, the final version of the product may not match the business needs and may not function the way the client imagines.

How do we use the Clear vision in Ronas IT?

Once one of our clients requested us to create a Super app - an app that combines several services: an online store, a food delivery service, an app for calling a taxi, an online theater, and a cloud file storage. Such an application has a huge number of functions - in what order should we add them? The only way is to prioritize the feature list and add them gradually.

What solution did our analyst suggest? At first, he created an Impact map and defined aims, actors, and their impact on the success of the future project. After that, he created the list of user stories and the list of app features. Then the analyst prioritized the list together with the client. They decided to add services in the following order. Super app was based on an online store that was later connected to a food delivery service, an application for calling a taxi, and then an online cinema.

In this case, the creation of the Clear vision was crucial, because it allowed us to break the project into several stages and prioritize them after preparing the Understanding of the project. Our client was satisfied with this approach because he understood what stages of work were ahead. Also, our client understood how much money he would need to develop this app.

The aim of this article was to give our readers a general understanding of Clear vision and tell them about analytical techniques and approaches that we use in our company. If you want to discuss your idea with us, click here.

*To find more details about Understanding the problem, read the article of Maxim Ilyakhov https://bit.ly/3AjC9lG