Speaking from personal experience, but being far from a pro and why I am loving this class; getting to the point of where you would need to start collecting requirements for a project is the beginning of a headache. To me it means the fun, imagination filled, brainstorming is over and its time to get to work. There is a list that has been created and more sub-lists for each item on the main list. If you have a local library you can go there and check up on industry codes of which then you can use those codes to pull demographics. Figure out some demographics and you can start pulling together requirements for questions to ask in surveys and the best way to reach your demographic. That is just the initial, after you get all your results back, its back to the beginning to make changes for the project to appeal and work for enough people to make a difference or make money.
This part will make you feel like you’re a hamster running in a wheel, revisiting the same items over and over and over again. The good feeling comes after months of work when your demographic starts replying in positive comments and actually giving suggestions that might help, they start to see the possibilities of positivity in the project. Hammer out the business plan, get the model written out, get the model written out, 5+ years with only a concept model?) By this time though you’ll start feeling like it might be a concept but it is an actuality, a possibility, it will start feeling real because everything will be attainable through research.
Then the stake holders become a most likely issue. In my experience if you have a good enough package made up, stake holders will not make any comments about how it could be better and imagine only about how much money they would make. They most likely will regard your package as being “risk-free” as everything has been addressed and have minimal involvement in their investment. To me this is a good sign because you’ll obviously have your stake holder on board and their trust, which also shows the quality of work you have done. There was a time when I sat with my mentor from SCORE an affiliate of the SBA (Small Business Administration), he realized that I had no idea what this process was. He took a deep breath and said he would help me by teaching it to me, all the steps. Instantly the thought crossed my mind that it was smooth sailing I’m going to be making tons of money by the end of the month and I would have to start getting in shape for all my self portraits that were soon to be posted on major online publications. 6 months later, we were still meeting in the same conference room, at times yelling at each other, there wasn’t a cup of frustration but more like a bucket full of frustration in the room. Dry erase markers being thrown around not really sure how many trees were murdered during that time from the amount of paper I went through. In the end, the project was scrapped because we found out that in 2013 there just wasn’t enough bandwidth on the internet to support the project. The idea was given over to another group of kids looking for their next big venture and they took mine with their own twist. Cell phones to live stream concerts, which ultimately ended up being the reason why venues were banning cell phones and not what my idea was. Maybe I’ll revisit my project when I get my current one up and running on the cloud, but it would mean months of planning, but after this class, I’m sure it will be a lot easier!