Designing

While the market risk of the consumer's acceptance of the project will exist until the project is up and operating, the development risk can be substantially mitigated by completing a good set of drawings and specifications. With these, the client can know much more precisely what it is getting and for how much, as detailed designs are preamble to detailed estimates and schedules.

In addition to the obvious nuts & bolts of more traditional construction, entertainment development almost always has production components (video, music, graphics, etc.), and today, IT applications are more common than not. In both these cases, advancing the design means different things; though, the benefits from having a detailed understanding is the same.

Storyboards, treatments and draft scripts help further define the key production components. In the case of IT, scenario development, and outline specifications serve the same purposes. As technology changes so quickly, the added step is a technology overview comparing the desired scenarios with the state of hardware and software systems.

Lastly, with respect to Designing, just in time staffing impacts not only soft cost budgets, it can have enormous impact on the sucess of the project.

Bringing in the right people at the right time within the extended family of the development team, can make or break a project. Bringing in the talent too early and there is a good liklelihood that work will have to be redone, or less than optimal design is implemented.

Bringing in the talent too late, and the inherent interelatedness of one aspect of design to the next is likely to be compromised, and "We coulda, shoulda, woulda if we had only known," results. The right information has two dimensions to it. Tha quality of the information is neccessary, but not sufficient. If the so called right information arrives too late to be fully effective or even implemented at all, then it by definition is the wrong information.