When starting out on a new Umbraco Project it’s really important to know and communicate your requirements and your desired features.

There are many ways of communicating these, but here at Carbon Six Digital, we use a spreadsheet called the Prioritised Requirements and Traceability Matrix. Long name, but easy idea.

First the requirements list. This is a methodical list of all the features the new system must incorporate alongside other factors such as security and performance requirements. The functional requirements are often best articulated as a “User Story”.

The list should be Prioritised so that the developers focus attention on those features and requirements that are most important. For Agile Projects where the feature list flexes but the budget is fixed - prioritisation is critical to ensure that the budget is spent only on those features that really matter. We tend to use the MoSCoW prioritisation mnemonic (Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have) to reach a common understanding with stakeholders on the importance they place on the delivery of each requirement.

It’s also useful to capture those requirements which are subsequently agreed as out of scope, so we record the conversation and rationale behind de-scoping the feature.

Once the Prioritised Requirements part of the document is complete you’re ready to commission the work to be built. This is where the Traceability Matrix becomes useful as a means of demonstrating control over the project and will be the subject of our next blog post.

Next time you commission a new Umbraco website make sure you contact us to find out more about how we capture and control the requirements of Umbraco projects in a way that keeps things transparent and accessible for all involved.

Lastly, if you’re in the throws of having made bad buying decisions last time you bought an Umbraco Site perhaps because the requirements weren’t well controlled you might want to consider using our full-site Health Check service to get things back under control. We carry out a comprehensive review of your cloud-based website’s technical architecture, its hosting and the Umbraco CMS itself as well as any external system integrations. Once this has been completed, we provide you with a detailed report explaining our findings highlighting the urgency of any issues found and the steps needed to improve your Umbraco site.