Design Ontap

The client could have advertising booked, press releases ready to send, potential customers standing by, literature printed etc? Each business and each situation will have a different set of consequences for a project overrunning.

I am positive that Directors and Project Managers will agree that having a sound way of scheduling and managing projects is important. In addition, those who have multiple offices or remote staff, quality of communication is also of great importance.

In theory most projects should take a similar path, as shown below:

1. Ball-park quotation
2. Technical and/or Creative document
3. Final and full quotation
4. Technical and/or Creative document sign-off
5. Start and finish date calculated
6. Project content received from client
7. Regular progress updates given
8. Project finish
9. Amendments and additions
10. On-going maintenance & support

It all looks good in theory, however, on occasion unforeseen circumstances can deviate from the plan. These include:

• Content not arriving from the client in a timely manner
• Changes in the Technical and/or Creative document part-way through the project and therefore creating a need for a re-negotiation in the project Quote
• Technical problems such as, in the case of a web project, the live hosting server not configured to the pre-requisites
• Etc?

So what can we do to prevent projects overrunning and ensuring an excellent quality of communication?

The Quotation

In order to quote you must first calculate what your overheads are and how much profit you wish to make (I would suggest a percentage). In order for this to become useful information you must also calculate the ?real? productivity of your staff. For instance here at Design Ontap, based on our last calculations, we put-in 5 hours work per day out of 8. This is due to distractions, answering e-mails, speaking on the telephone and attending internal and client meetings. You must ensure the lost productivity hours are added to your overhead cost. So, your hourly rate should be overhead plus desired profit percentage.

Once the technical/creative document is constructed you can use this to calculate how long the project will take in man-hours based on experience. Here is a suggestion of how to calculate the labour quote:

Hourly rate multiplied by estimated project man-hours plus contingency (again, I would suggest a percentage) equals labour quotation.

The Creative and/or Technical Document

In order to have any hope of success, the supporting project documents must be as accurate as possible due to the quotation being drawn from the data within and will therefore ultimately affect the schedule. As before with the quotation, here is a suggestion of calculating the start and finish date:

Estimated project man-hours divided by actual working hours in a day equals quantity of man-days it will take to complete the project.

Then...

Take the amount of man-days available to you over the period (this will obviously depend on the quantity of staff) minus staff and public holidays equals the quantity of days you can have the project completed in.

And?

You must also take into consideration that staff could fall ill and the project may take longer than estimated. Ensure you add contingency time onto the finish date to account for this.

Design Ontap staff publish their work calendars using apple iCal which shows their current availability. This helps us scheduling milestones.

Milestones

Segmenting a project into milestones is important for many reasons; here are some of those reasons.

1. Milestones divide the project up into chunks so you can allocate these chunks to the staff that will work on the project. Different people work at different paces therefore allocating milestones to different people will give you a more accurate man-hours estimation for your quotation.
2. During the project, milestones provide a measurable indicator so progress analysis is accurate.
3. Morale is increased when milestones are completed as studio staff feel a sense of achievement once a milestone is complete.
4. By dividing a project up into milestones it will reveal dependencies for the milestone such as content and further direction from the client. You can then send this list of dependencies to the client before the project starts.
5. Looking at a project in segments demonstrates to staff that a larger project is achievable and is realistically scheduled.

In order to effectively manage milestones, tasks lists (such as milestone dependencies), documents and work allocation you?ll need a project management tool.

Mac OS X Project Management Tools

Design Ontap are an entirely Mac based company, apart from ?larry? our web testing PC. We choose Mac mainly for cost of ownership reasons.

Project management

We use activeCollab to organise our projects. This keeps your clients in-the-loop as you can give them access to the system via the web.

activeCollab can be installed on your own server, which is great for back-up purposes, and can be styled to your company?s own corporate branding. It is also free, which is nice.

Basecamp was the first and now the most popular online project management and collaboration tool. It does, however, carry a price tag and unfortunately sits on their server.

OmniGraffle Professional is an excellent project management companion. We use it for site maps, pre-design template layouts, brainstorming and project team structures.

Scheduling

We use iCal for project/milestone scheduling including staff and public holidays. If you have an apache server you can enable webdav and publish your calendar for others to subscribe to.

iCal also has some rather helpful functionality such as calendar grouping, to-do lists, alarms, notes, mobile phone bluetooth synchronisation, web publishing and other cool stuff. I am sure that iCal has less functionality than Outlook, however, iCal presents the information in a very clear and uncomplicated fashion and working on an already very complicated project, the less confusing the better.

Code collaboration

Our web development team work together on projects and need to collaborate on code. As we have two studios, one in the south and one in the north, the web development teams in both offices sometimes need to collaborate on code. So we use SubEthaEdit , which allows multiple programmers/developers to work on the same file. It?s very slick as you can see code from other developers being written in real-time, clever stuff. We are currently looking to implement CVS .

The development team are currently trialling Textmate for non-collaborative programming.

Communication

The quality of communication between everyone working on a project is incredibly important.

Allocate someone to be the project manager, ensure that person isn?t ?hands-on? the project itself. It is unrealistic to expect someone who is ?hands-on? a project to look at the project through the client?s and target audiences? eyes.

Although having an extranet such as activeCollab is great, there are some things that need the personal touch such as progress updates (including potential delays) and chasing up milestone dependencies. A telephone call or videoconference ensures written correspondence such as e-mail is not misconstrued. Sending an e-mail afterwards to confirm what you have said creates a paper trail just-in-case.

We use Apple iChat for light communication with our staff, it is also a handy way of transferring temporary files. For remote meetings with our northern office in Barrow-in-Furness we use iChat?s videoconferencing functionality using iSight cameras. iChat also has a four-way videoconferencing facility which is just awesome.

As for light communication with clients who don?t have iChat we use Adium which allows you to chat with AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, .Mac, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Lotus Sametime, Novell GroupWise and Zephyr.

We use Skype for video conferencing from Mac to PC, we have tested the Beta version 1.5.0.17 (Beta version 2.0.0.2 I now available) which works fairly well, however, the frame rate and quality does not even come close to iChat.

As for e-mail we use Apple Mail which is a very simple yet clever mail client. Its biggest feature is index based searching, which makes finding e-mails very easy indeed and smart folders that show e-mails according to your specific criteria. For instance I have a smart folder called ?to-do?s? which displays my flagged e-mails. We tried Thunderbird for a little while purely because of its excellent LDAP address book, however, despite Apple Mail?s poor LDAP integration we switched back.

Summary

By working out an average number of hours your staff work taking into consideration daily distractions will provide an accurate time-scale. Putting your head in the sand isn?t going to help anyone.

Milestones not only show an accurate progress indication but also help to keep staff morale high. If staff can see that a project can be completed within the set time-scales then productivity will go up. Also, by setting targets in conjunction with financial bonuses adds a little security to the finish date.

Embracing tools such as activeCollab and basecamp to assist in managing a project can only have a positive outcome. Using calendar software such as iCal for scheduling will prevent any nasty surprises.

Make sure every scrap of information is backed-up to a remote source, to lose your data half way through a project would be disastrous. We use rsync for our incremental back-ups that backs up our internal servers to Dedipower, a data centre in Reading.

Finally, communication is key. E-mail might have revolutionised how we communicate but you can?t beat a face-to-face meeting, videoconference or telephone call.