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Q. What comes first, the assets or the programming?
A. Make the components - then the program to use them.
One really big mistake I see being made quite often is that project development cycles are collapsed. The critical path through the project is paralleled to the extent that code, video, audio, content, text and pictures are all being worked on at once. I think this is likely to lead to a product that is inconsistent and somewhat less well integrated than it should be. I think the development cycle should be strung out in a more linear way. There is no reason why several projects cannot run simultaneously but you have to organise them so that they overlap. I think it could work like this:
The marketing and concepts people should develop an idea first.
Then when the board thinks it worth proceeding with, the project is sent to the content researcher who locates the source material. The structure and layout can be evolved in story boards at this stage and a working prototype site can be built as a reference. While this takes place, the marketers can be looking for the next project.
Once the prototype and the source research are done, it is handed to the content developers. At this point the artists can develop the art components, the audio and video people can produce all their assets and the authors can create the textual content. While this happens, the researchers are working on the second project and the marketers are looking for a third one.
Once all the assets are completed, they can be passed to the integration team to be assembled into a working framework. While this happens, the artists begin on project 2, the researches work on project 3 and the marketers look for project 4.
Finally, the programmers and integrators pass the product to the testers and the production people finalise the packaging and brief the sales people. At this point you should have five projects running simultaneously and they should each come to fruition one after another with as short a delay between each one as possible.
Of course this is an idealised and perfect scenario where all projects are more or less of the same complexity and content size.
The alternative is a very stop start and haphazard way of trying to get the art sorted out while the integrators are assembling the unfinished art into the half developed program framework. Even so, the audio and video may be incomplete and there is a lot of backwards and forwards of material and various reworking exercises. In the end, a lot of wasted time and effort and no development work being done on the next project so that will likely go the same way.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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