Author: Chris Tingom

For years I struggled over the concept of deadlines and wondered why it was so very difficult to meet them. And then I realized that in order to meet deadlines for software / web development projects, you really need the commitment of both the developer and the customer. You can always move the deadline, but if that’s what you want to do, at least call them milestones.

Most people suck at managing projects

Most people have more than one project going at a time, and when one deadline is moved it moves the other ones (whether you want to admit this or not).

The odds of a large project finishing on time are close to zero. — From Rapid Development (Amazon)

Today I learned that close to 25% of all airline trips are late

Wow, that’s stunning. It just goes to show that most people are optimistic and can’t even predict when a project will be done. There are countless tools that exist today to try to facilitate creating accurate estimates, but most of them are useless because we are all so busy, and a million things impact our days, thus impacting our schedules.

If missing deadlines wasn’t enough, there is a horrible failure rate in software development projects. Some people say 5 – 15% of all projects fail.

Say no, do less

Tips on the gentle art of saying no. I’m not going to comment further since I’m really bad at this.

Throw deadlines out

Stop thinking you can accurately predict the future. Give your customers a realistic expectation that you can have their project done during a window of time. You’ll quickly find that most people don’t need an exact “delivery date” for their projects. Instead they just want to know progress is being made.

I’m not suggesting that it’s good to be late on your projects, just that you accept the fact that it’s nearly impossible to meet deadlines the way you’ve been going after them, and you should change your procedure.

The deadline dance is not always productive.

Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less wrote this list of the top ten highest-value uses of your time.

1. Things that advance your overall purpose in life
2. Things you have always wanted to do
3. Things already in the 20/80 relationship of time to results
4. Innovative ways of doing things that promise to slash the time required and/or multiply the quality of results
5. Things other people tell you can’t be done
6. Things other people have done successfully in a different arena
7. Things that use your own creativity
8. Things that you can get other people to do for you with relatively little effort on your part
9. Anything with high-quality collaborators who have already transcended the 80/20 rule of time, who use time eccentrically and effectively
10. Things for which it is now or never

That’s enough to take the family on a nice vacation. Once our company switched to billing per-hour for (almost) all of our projects, our profits soared. We’re delighted because we’re now doing an amazing job tracking our time. Both billable and non billable.

The figure that I mentioned above — $4,687.50 — represents the accumulation of only an hour and fifteen minutes a week in billable hours. A paltry fifteen minutes a day, at $75 an hour, adds up to a nice vacation at the end of the year. Counting only 5 day weeks for 50 weeks a year.

Amazing, huh? Imagine what you could do if you tracked an extra hour a day.

Most companies just give away time like this. It’s too-small to track, they say. But the reality is that if you use an efficient tool for tracking time, it’s easy! And it pays off, as you can see.

Minuteglass is that tool (just wait until we launch!)

I hope that this demonstration helps you appreciate the value of tracking your time. It’s stunning, really, how most people don’t track time. If you charge your customers an hourly rate, it pays to track your time with a solid time tracking tool. It’s important to “independent agents” and also large companies of any size.

Benefits of tracking time:

1. Earn more money by tracking your time better.
2. Keeps you focused on your task at hand. When the clock is running, you know you need to be productive.
3. Motivation: At the end of the day, if you can look at your time log and see how much you accomplished, and how much money you earned, it boosts your enthusiasm for what you do.
4. It helps you estimate future projects (you can see how long a similar project took).
5. Even if you don’t bill your customers an hourly rate, it’s great to know how much you work, and really know.

Paper is great. You can easily use it to stay organized. In many ways, paper is better than any software tool for keeping up to date on your tasks. You can take it anywhere!

I present you with four links that will help you organize your projects and your life on paper.

1. Moleskine PDA — Using your Moleskine notebook as a project and task organizer. Simple but clever.
2. The Emergent Task Planner — An amazing paper based tool for staying on track in your day.
3. Paper Prototyping — Paper prototypes invite people with little-to-no technical background into the design process.
4. Remember names at meetings by making a map — Sometimes the obvious ones are the best.

My favorite tip of all time is this: Grab a sheet of paper and write down what you are going to accomplish today. Then make a new sheet every single day (or every night, before you head home).

Freelancers and people new to the service industry ask this often enough: Should I charge an hourly rate or should I give people specific quotes?

Going hourly is often the best, and the easiest since you can avoid the headache of trying to charge more when a client changes the scope of a project (that happens more often than not, in my experience).

Neil Tortorella from Creative Latitude has written an excellent guide for those thinking about billing your projects hourly. He answers the important question of how much to charge per hour to meet your profit goals.

The process to figure out your hourly rate:

• What’s your target salary? How much do you want to make in a year?
• On top of that, you’ll need to figure in other associated costs like taxes, FICA, insurance, etc.
• Total up the number of working hours available to you, subtracting vacation, sick days, and holidays
• Figure out what percentage of your day is non-billable and subtract that (typically 25% – 50% depending on a lot of factors)
• Divide your target salary by the number of working days you have
• Figure out what your overhead is, and calculate the total cost of overhead for each working hour
• The final rate is the number you’ll use to do your estimating, whether you charge by the hour or by the job. It’s the number you can’t afford to go below.

Does that make sense? Read Neil’s article for the full details.

I’ll spend some more time in the future talking about providing clients with fixed-bids, and how to avoid problems with scope creep and avoiding endless projects.