Our project work flow usually starts with a specification and a design. So, by the time we start the actual work we have done a lot of preparation work. There are briefs, meetings, quotations, presentations, proposals, designs and specifications.
Now, each project has a certain budget and the budget represents the time we have to complete the project. Each project also has a team of people working on it. We usually have a minimum of one designer, one user interface developer, one programmer and one interactive developer in a project team led by the producer.
If a project was successful or not can not be evaluated by only comparing the cost to the budget. There are many factors we can use to improve our processes and products.
Taking a snapshot of the project can help to give better figures. A snapshot can be determined by taking the start of the project and the time the requirements of the initial specification have been completed.
It’s important to track if the spec has changed, because a change in the spec can result in more or less time to be spent.
The team working on the project needs to be evaluated as well. A meeting after the project was completed should include all team members in order to discuss what went well and what needs to be improved. Also, the team setup might have been wrong, if you only have the rock-stars in one team and the juniors in the other teams you get most likely uneven results. You don’t want to stop a winning team, but you also want to have many winning teams and not just one.
Deadlines are an important influence as well. You might work towards a deadline which makes your team stay longer or work faster. This is great as you complete the project in the allocated time. At the same time one of the rules in interactive development is, if you do a quick and dirty job, it will come back to you quick and dirty – sooner or later. Finding the right balance is all based on experience and one of the complexities we have to deal with.
Quality comes next. We said quick and dirty before. You might hit the deadline, but it’s just not as nice as you wanted it to be. Evaluating the quality of the work helps to improve and aim for better results. The complexity of the project matters as you will deliver that email shot in time without problems, but that real-time-market-watch-application will just go on forever. Therefore a more complex project needs to get more attention and needs to be looked at in a different way.
Task size is important as well. The smaller the tasks that you define the easier for all team members to understand the project and their responsibility. Defining tasks also leads, whoever puts the tasks into place, to actually think properly and in depth about the project.
Points to evaluate
- The Team, member and role
- Spec and spec changes
- Problems occurred and suggestions to avoid them
- Was there a deadline or a timeline
- Quality of the result
- Complexity and difficulty of the project
- Task size and allocated time