A paid discovery phase is usually worth it, as long as you end up owning something you could take to another supplier. Discovery, sometimes called scoping, is sold by almost everyone nowadays and the word covers a lot of different things. The key thing to look at is what you are holding at the end, which matters a good deal more than the fee.
Key takeaways
- A fixed price quoted before anyone has done discovery is usually a guess, because nobody can price work that has not been pinned down.
- For most small and medium projects, expect one to two weeks of senior time, which usually comes to between 5% and 15% of your build budget.
- A few hours of free work before you commit is normal and worth having, but it is not a discovery phase.
- If you are paying for the discovery itself, the supplier can afford to tell you not to build the thing at all.
- You probably do not need discovery if the job is small enough to describe on a page, or if it would swallow a serious share of your budget.
What you should be holding at the end
The test is whether you could take it somewhere else. If you could hand what you have to three other suppliers and get comparable quotes back, then discovery has done its job. If it only makes sense as a step towards hiring the people who wrote it, you have paid for a sales pitch. There are two shapes that pass this test, and which one you want depends on what you intend to do next.
If you want to know what a build will cost, you should end up with a written specification saying what the software does, who uses it and what is out of scope. You should also get some designs or wireframes, because most people struggle to react to a description and react immediately to a picture. Finally you need a price against that specification and how long that price stands for.
That is the shape behind every build we can quote firmly. On Benefits Buddy, a staff-benefits platform with several types of user across web and mobile, the scope was written down in phases before any code was written. We could give a firm price because the specification came first.
If you intend to go out to market, you should end up with a findings report and a requirements document you can put out to tender. The findings say what you are running now, what is wrong with it and what your realistic options are. They should cover your processes as well as your software, because a fair share of what feels like a technology problem turns out to be a working-practice problem that no new system will fix. The tender document then turns all of that into functional, technical and implementation requirements any supplier can bid against. This is the most portable form discovery takes, because it is built to be sent to your supplier's competitors. Work of that shape is really independent technology consultancy, and it is worth buying it that way, from someone whose only job is the recommendation.
It is also why the price cannot come first. Nobody can commit to a firm number for work that has not been pinned down, which is why fixed-price projects start with a specification.
What it should cost, and what drives it
For a typical small or medium business project, a proportionate discovery is a couple of weeks of work by a small senior team, and lands in the low thousands of pounds. For context on the rates behind that, see what bespoke software costs in the UK.
What moves the number is how much there is to find out, and how many people you have to find it out from. Interviewing half a dozen staff across a couple of days on site is a known quantity. Untangling how six sites currently do the same job in six different ways is much harder to predict.
As a rule of thumb we would expect scoping to come to somewhere between 5% and 15% of your build budget. If you are quoted much above that, ask what makes it so big. There may well be a good reason and it is worth hearing what it is.
Is free discovery worth having?
Yes, as long as you know what you are getting. Most suppliers will give you something before you have committed to anything, and we do this ourselves. Usually that is a short document, sometimes a few wireframes, and a few hours of thinking about your problem. It is a normal part of selling and it is worth having. You will learn a lot about how a supplier thinks from a few hours of their work.
It is not a discovery phase though. Nobody has interviewed your staff, looked at the systems you are actually running, or written anything you could hand to another supplier. That is usually weeks of work, and a supplier who blurs the two is hoping you will not notice.
Free work still gets paid for somewhere. It might be recovered in the build price, or you may simply feel obliged to people who have given you their time for nothing. Neither of these is sinister, but it is worth knowing they are happening.
The bigger issue is incentives. If we are being paid to do the scoping, we can afford to tell you that an off-the-shelf product would do the job, or that some of your problem is process and not software, or that you should wait. A supplier doing it for free needs to win the build.
We have scoped projects where our recommendations started with getting more out of the systems the client already had, and changing the way some things were done. New software did not come into it. That is a much easier conversation to have when you are being paid for the advice.
When discovery is not worth paying for
If the job is small and you could describe it on a page, do not buy a process to tell you what you already know. Ask for a quote and get on with it. The same goes if you have already been through this with somebody else and own a specification. Take what you have and get it priced. We will quote a build against a specification we did not write, and so should anyone else worth hiring. If you are holding a perfectly good document and are told you have to buy their discovery first, that is a sales position.
If discovery would eat a serious share of your total budget, the answer is to buy less of it. A couple of days that produce a rough shape and an honest range is better than a fortnight you cannot afford. Any supplier worth hiring will scale it to what is in front of them, and if they will only sell you the full engagement, that tells you something.
What to do next
Before you agree to a discovery phase, ask what you will be holding at the end that you could take to someone else. It is a simple question and you will learn a lot from how easily it gets answered.
Our own scoping service is built to pass that test. We interview your key staff, then hand you a detailed specification, interactive wireframes and a fixed-price quote that stands for six months. All of it is yours and you are free to take it to any supplier.
If you are not sure your project needs one at all, tell us what you are trying to build and we will give you an honest answer, including when that answer is that you do not need us.
FAQs
How long does a discovery phase last?
The work itself is usually one to two weeks for a typical small or medium project. How long it takes in elapsed time is a different question, and that is almost always decided by your side. If the people who know how the business actually works can give us a couple of days between them, it moves quickly. If they can only spare an hour a week it will stretch out, and the report will be worse for it. Our own scoping step is built around that, which is why we measure it in days of your people's time.
What should a discovery phase include?
It should include time with the people who actually do the work, and not just the managers who commissioned the project. It should also include a look at whatever systems and spreadsheets are already in use, because that is usually where the real process lives. You want enough design work to make the thing discussable, and a written record of what was decided and what was deliberately left out, so that nobody reopens it halfway through the build. That record is what a fixed price is later promised against.