Business Development: The Right Way
There is a right way on attacking any business development process. To do it the right way, there are five steps that you should keep in consideration. These steps are business analysis requirements, design, implementation or production, testing, and evaluation. A sixth and floating step can be placed at the end which is called the support. It is called a floating step since not all businesses require support once their product or service has been purchased from them. Yet, there are many businesses that require this step which means that for those businesses, this step is required.
Be it a product or a service industry, the business always starts with business analysis requirements. Yet, a prologue to this process can be a feasibility study to determine the marketability of the business. A versatile way to perform business analysis requirements is through agile requirements gathering. This allows the business to have a preliminary requirements list which can be easily revised when certain circumstances arise such as product improvement or expansion of market segment. The design step works hand in hand with business analysis requirements because the input for the design comes from the analysis.
With the design at hand, implementation or production is started. The output of this step is the final product (or service) that is granted to the customer. Testing is done before the final product is sent to the customer to check that all requirements have been complied to. If there is a discrepancy between the requirements and the final product, necessary corrections are done. If corrections are not sufficient, the production is performed over again. It is important to comply with requirements at first production to avoid incurring costs of re-implementation.
Evaluation is done to check what has gone wrong during the implementation and to get the best practices that can be adapted to other similar businesses. The evaluation step wraps-up the whole implementation.
Support is usually provided if there should be technical guidance that the business needs to provide the customer with. Otherwise, the responsibility of the business ends upon the delivery of the product to the customer.