- Understand the project brief, requirements, goals and objectives.
- Read the company’s response or quote to item 1 and understand 372 Digital’s proposed approach.
- Meet and work out with the project team your duties and responsibilities for the project.
- Understand the limitations and layout a plan to best meet the requirements within the budget allocated in the quotation. If you believe the budget is insufficient, discuss it with the team and together come up with an alternative approach to fit within the budget.
- Make sure the tasks are delegated to the appropriate members of the team with the right skill set to do the work.
- Understand the project delivery expectations and work efficiently to complete the work per the schedule. You must let your supervisor know as early as possible if you are unable to complete what you are tasked to do on time. Many of 372 Digital’s projects have high level delivery expectations and if not met, results in a loss of income and pushes other company projects back as well as puts the company reputation on the line. Our clients also suffer losses as a result. Delays in production pushes our client plans back resulting in productivity loss and potential earnings.
- Do not start on any work that is outside of scope without a written cost approval from the client.
- Avoid doing patches of work where you leave unfinished work behind and start another, planning to return and continue the work later. This is bad practice and is unproductive. It often results in issues down the track, wasting time and money.
- You have the responsibility to not only do the work you are tasked to do but to ensure the project you are working on is complete and successful. Successful means that it meets the client expectations based on the company’s proposed solution and not the client’s wishes, completed within budget and at a quality level you and the company is proud to own.
- It is your responsibility to bring to a senior designer’s attention, any parts of your work that does not look right and need to be designed.
- Respect the final design. It was designed by the designer and approved by the client for a reason. You must develop strictly per the final design provided.
- All structural or functional builds that change the look of the user interface in any way, that is not on the finalised designs must first go through a designer to seek their guidance for implementation.
- When asked to provide an estimate for new work or additional work for a project, you must take into consideration all cases. This includes
- your estimated time of completion providing all goes to plan
- the amount of risk for bugs or defects that may arise. NOTE: if you are more experienced and is familiar with the work, do not estimate less but rather think back to when you were less experienced to base your estimate on
- the level of testing required
- take into account time spent for research, meetings, writing and replying to emails
- take into account time spent on other administrative tasks such as entering the work in Jira, Support CRM and Open Project.
- take into account the type of client and how long it takes to get approvals… Once you have your times all figured, make sure to let the designer know if he or she also needs to provide an estimate to go with yours.
- You are responsible for the estimates you provide and is expected to complete the work accordingly. Be reasonable but accurate in allocating time. Unreasonable estimates will not get the work which in turn is not good for the business.
- Justify all your estimates. Provide the client a short and easy to understand rationale each time your provide an estimate to help them understand what they are paying for.
- Provide two cost solutions whenever possible, with the differences clearly defined when providing estimates. This also helps set clear expectations and in turn prevent scope creeps from happening because the client is given a clear outline of what they are getting for their money.
- Do not be generous but be reasonable. Generosity puts the company on unstable ground from productivity loss to the loss of income. If the client is unable to afford what you are offering, review your estimates and resubmit. Do not under estimate. You are still responsible for the new estimate provided. If the client is still unable to afford the new offer, seek guidance from Ben. Ben will negotiate with the client a payment plan. If the client is unreasonable then the work will not proceed.
- Do not spend too much time planning a custom solution when an off-the-shelf solution is available and can satisfy the requirement. The cost of purchase for the off-the-shelf solution including its implementation often outweighs the cost for building a custom solution. Your goal is to rollover projects as quickly as possible, satisfying all requirements as best as possible within the budget allocated… 372 Digital’s personal projects designed to sell under license is exempt from this rule. 372 Digital cannot rely on the integrity of any third-party solutions that may compromise the future of its products, unless the third-party solution is well supported by a community of developers and is open-source.
- Immediately delete files and databases that are no longer required on the server. It’s best to do the deleting of files while the project is fresh in your mind. This way you can be more confident in your approach. Do a backup should you need to before deleting and store the backup on the company’s local server as per the company SOP.
- All websites added to staging must have a username and password to prevent unauthorised visits and prevent the indexing on search engines.
