Analysis & Design

The Analysis & Design (A&D) phase is a specific period in the life of a project. It is the first of three phases (A&D, Build & Develop, Install & Deploy) that shape the execution of a project.
It can consist of several stages:

A&D - Initialization
Initialization in the A&D phase consists of defining:

The organisation of the project

The composition of the programme/project team to be mobilised,

The various experts and if necessary the subcontractors to be engaged,

The project leader or project director to be appointed, the tasks to be carried out,

The steering committee to be set up, and the various governance bodies

The schedule of macro-activities to be carried out in order to implement this phase, with their scheduling, duration and various milestones,

The macro-budget to be committed to the project,

The scheduled deliverables,

Methods for checking the results, particularly by setting up KPIs.

A project is, by definition, an innovation within the organisation and is subject to many unknowns. Its various components (planning, activities, scheduling, etc.) must therefore be re-evaluated regularly so as to make them evolve, but also to ensure that the project remains justified with respect to the initial evaluation (return on investment, importance of the risks, etc.)

A&D - General Study / Detailed Study / General Specification
The Study or Specification in the A&D phase consists of designing or specifying what needs to be done or manufactured to achieve the objective (possibly with the drafting of a specification). These studies involve the project owner and the project manager. It is an expression of needs or general specifications when these deliverables are "functional" and expressed by the users, and we then reserve the term specifications (or detailed specifications) for more technical documents, or in any case which detail the internal functioning of the expected software (in the case of an IT project for example).

A&D - Solution finding
The search for solutions consists of studying different technical and functional solutions or architectures according to the constraints of skills, equipment, deadlines as well as financial and marketing aspects. The choices must then be validated by the production of models or prototypes and possibly the placing on a test market. Any deviations measured allow the choices to be rectified. In IT projects, this phase takes into account urbanisation and architecture concerns. When choosing an existing solution on the market (particularly in the case of software packages), this phase is based on a call for tenders.