About this methodology

Before you start

This methodology is rooted in the ‘double-diamond’ - a way of thinking developed by the International Design Organisation and used by global organisations to tackle problems and challenges. During any phase of work you may be considering lots of options, before converging on a solution. There’s no point when you’re solving a problem when you shouldn’t be open to new ideas. However, this is very different from a ‘waterfall’ approach when you spend the first part of a project defining the requirements, and the second part delivering these requirements.

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Phase 1 - Discover

The discovery phase enables you to form a team around a clear understanding of a problem. We always start with a discovery exercise, even if a service has already identified a particular software solution. The end of a discovery phase helps us understand whether we can reuse an existing piece of software, buy something or need to build some, or all, of the solution.
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Phase 2 - Developing a Minimum Viable Product

After a Discovery phase we develop a 'minimum viable product'. This needs to do just enough to be able to test our key hypotheses and/or to understand whether we can overcome key project risks, without doing so much that it's too expensive or takes too long to develop.
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Phase 3 - Build

This phase is where you start building the service and releasing it for customers to use in a ‘production environment’. At the end of the phase you will have a working service, though still have important things left to do.
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Phase 4 - Improve

This phase describes the key activities that happen to support the continuous improvement of the service. It should end only when the service is decommissioned, although practically resource constraints may mean that it is shorter.
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