Section 11.7. The Project Plan

11.7. The Project Plan

We often find it useful to go beyond the content management discussion and actually create a project plan for information architecture design as part of the strategy phase deliverables.

This project plan can accomplish two major objectives. First, when developed in parallel with the strategy report, it forces the team to constantly ask questions such as:

• How will we accomplish that?

• How long will it take?

• Who will do it?

• What kinds of deliverables will be required?

• What are the dependencies?

This ensures that information architecture strategy is grounded in reality. The second objective of the project plan is to form the bridge between strategy and design. It can be integrated with plans from other teams (e.g., interaction design, content authoring, or application development) toward the development of a structured schedule for overall site design.

Given the common need to show some immediate progress, we usually provide short-term and long-term plans. In the short-term plan, we focus on low-hanging fruit, defining a process for design changes that can and should be made immediately to improve the information architecture. In the long-term plan, we present a methodology for fleshing out the information architecture, noting interdependencies with other teams where appropriate.