Three Ways to Increase Your New Digital Project’s Chance of Success

How might you help your project be successful? How can you stack the odds in your favour?

Check if you’re planning to do these three things.

1. Run a solution-finding project
Look at your plans. Are you thinking about building a solution or finding a solution? The difference is important. It’s the difference between old and new ways to build digital services.

The old approach
‘We’ve specified the solution up front, we think we know what it needs to do, and how it needs to work. We’ve worked this out either by people telling us what they need, or because we had a good idea. Now we just need to get on and build the solution.’

A new approach
‘We’ve got a problem we want to solve and some ideas for how we might achieve it. But we understand that we’re making some assumptions and probably haven’t found the right solution yet. So we’re going to investigate the problem further through user research. Then we’re going to run some tests on what we then think are possible solutions.’

Do you see the difference?

Even after you’ve built and launched a digital service, you should continue to use this ‘solution finding’ approach to making changes or adding features.

2. Understand the difference between user and social value
How much do you understand the difference? It’s okay if you don’t yet. User value is a tech term that, until recently, wasn’t used much in the voluntary sector. So let’s start with social value.

Social value is something we do know a lot about. It’s the value of an intervention or service in terms of how it affects a social problem. It’s pretty interchangeable with “social impact” or “social outcomes”.

To read the full Catalyst blog click here.

Source: Catalyst