We’ve looked at the process that Ctrl Group uses to plan a project; how we make sure that we’ve the necessary information, systems and processes in place to keep the project on track throughout development and delivery.

Key principles:

• Proper planning at the beginning of a project is vital, whichever project management style you’re using, but planning is also something you keep doing throughout a project, checking back with your original objectives
• Use a product story to bring your diverse team and stakeholders together
• Be clear about your true dependencies, assumptions and risks, and plan for them
• Make sure everyone knows their roles and responsibilities
• Iterative design processes give you the flexibility you need when working on projects that are based on developing new technology and require user testing along the way
• For medical products you need to be able to trace back and evidence all the design decisions you’ve made along the way. Build this into your workflow so it doesn’t get forgotten about

We recommend taking the short multiple choice quizzes on the next pages to check that you’ve grasped the basic principles.

There are also three tasks associated with this module, these can be done individually or as a group.

In our next module we’ll be focussing on user-centred research and the methods we use to do this effectively.