Update: The guide located at http://planningdrupalsites.com is now a book - Drupal: The Guide to Planning and Building Websites, available at http://tinyurl.com/6zdlxwf
What this book covers
Part 1: Planning your Website
Chapter 1: Introduction to Drupal and Planning provides a quick introduction Drupal, an overview of a site’s lifecycle, and where planning fits in.
Chapter 2: Managing Open Source Projects provides insights into various development methodologies and management practices you might find use on a Drupal project.
Chapter 3: Conducting a Needs Analysis goes beyond asking the question “Do I need a site?” and identifies the purpose of your site and how your competitors might influence how you proceed.
Chapter 4: Collecting Requirements offers a series of analyses designed to facilitate the identification and analysis of what your site needs to meet its purpose.
Chapter 5: Creating a Design Plan provides a process for translating your requirements into a visual representation of your site.
Part 2: Building and Sustaining your Website
Chapter 6: Planning Development offers a process to identify a development solution that meets your specific requirements and design.
Chapter 7: Coordinating Implementation covers site launch and more. It covers many of the non-development tasks that should be considered for a successful site launch.
Chapter 8: Sustaining the Site explores both routine and planned maintenance for your Drupal site as well as site management tasks that support your site’s users.
Part 3: Sample Site
Chapter 9: A Sample Plan puts into practice the analyses and tasks presented in chapters 3 through 5.
Chapter 10: Sample Build Recipe creates a development plan and Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 module recipe that can be used to build the site defined in chapter 9. It also describes the how the site will be implemented and sustained.