I was in a meeting yesterday with a couple of the guys on the intranet team, and asked them about the process they have for user experience (UE) changes: collecting requirements, creating designs, getting signoff, etc...
Their answer is that basically they've done a sufficiently good job on this that asside from a couple of sign-offs from the brass they're pretty much free to do things that seem to make sense. For the latest round, it took two people 7 months to come up with requirements for a new set of designs, and that this felt like a long time.
wow.
We just updated the UE of our external site. I'd estimate it took at least an order of magnitude more human months to figure out and document what it was that we were going to do do. Not implementing a single line of code, mind you. Just deciding what it was that we were going to do: what would the new home page look like? what should our other page templates look like?
A lot of this makes sense. The brand of the company is involved. There is a lot of mission critical business on the website, with potential customers, existing customers, investors, etc... The intranet by its nature is internal, so the marketing, support, and product teams don't really want to be part of the conversation every step of the way.
How much effort should we be putting into tracking the effort we put our UE requirements and design? Are there any industry benchmarks for this kind of thing that would be relevant?
