Superheroes are not real!

posted by ryan on June 29th, 2007

Time & money, traditionally these are the two biggest areas of conflict between client and developers. The reality is that with a little planning and instinct these problems don’t have to be yours alone.

Remember, when you are doing work for customers you don’t own the budget or the timeline, they do, so you should never be the only one making choices about them.

Stage 1: Planning The beginning of a relationship its great, butterflies, the promise of money, the feeling of accomplishment and start of something grand. These feelings along with money troubles and developer desperation often are the root of under estimated budgets and irresponsible timelines.

This is where sense-memory comes in. When I put together a budget and timeline I try to take myself back to special place that I call “the last week of my most challenging project”. I have several of these moments. It’s the time when you realized that you underestimated the money and time and now are up against the wall, + your customer is questioning every hour and is late paying their bill. Now if they asked me for another big chunk of work how would I estimate it.

When you put you self in that place you make much more realistic and prudent choices about how long and involved things will be and thus end up with budgets you can meet and timelines that won’t force you to spend all night working.

Ok now that we have a good budget an timeline what happens when things change or we are just plain wrong.

Stage 2: Listen to your inner [your name here] We have all had those moments where look at the what’s left to do and the deadline date and think, this is not gonna be easy. The problem is we usually ignore the voice until we have a week left and a dribble of hours in the kitty by which point a BIG conflict is inevitable.

Invent a crisis and invent it early. Crisis can be very positive as long as it’s small. When you have 8 weeks left and tell a client the timeline won’t work they have time to make some hard choices if they want to make the date. They can remove features, increase the budget, bring in other resources. The key is to allow them to have the time and remaining budget to make their own choices.

The only way to have a successful customer relationship is to have them deeply invested in all the key choices of the project. At the end of the day it’s their product.

Again this is why you need to have client contact every billable day. The second you feel the timeline/budget is not enough you need to deal with it.

If you look a project that had issues you can always remember the first moment your know things were not right as well as the moment much later when you voiced your concerns.

Don’t be a super-hero, they are fictional.