Project Management

We use an open source project management tool called Gitlab. Here the project is broken down into ‘issues’ and you can follow the progress, add comments and see how much time has been tracked to date.

On a higher level, we also have a detailed pipeline of all our ongoing work, our capacity each month and when we have availability to work on your project. The more notice you can give us of any upcoming project you want us to work on, the better.

Each client we work with has a dedicated ‘project lead’ from our team who will be your key contact. We also strongly encourage you to have a similar role on your end to help keep communication channels open and give you the best value for money. If you haven’t already, you can read more about our values and our preferred way of working with clients here.

Planning and estimates

It can be hard to estimate the time and costs of software projects, especially when you are doing something new or innovative. While there are no silver bullets, there are some sensible things you can do to minimise the risk and ensure the best outcomes and provide value for money.

We want strike the balance between certainty while allowing us to adjust course as we go.

All our estimates are split broadly into two types of work:

Development and consultancy – for specific projects that you’d like us to carry out. We typically provide an itemised list of tasks for each project with an estimated cost per task.

Ongoing support and maintenance – keeping everything up-to-date and running smoothly and answering ad-hoc support requests. We typically provide an annual estimate for these.

Mitigating risk

Estimates for our standard CRM and website work are pretty reliable. We’ll rarely go over budget and can often come in under budget.

For more innovative work, including software development, there is more of a risk that we’ll exceed the original estimate. That might be due to things that come to light after the initial scoping. For these projects, there are a number of ways to reduce the risk, including:

• phased development with feedback on early prototypes and drafts
• pilot project
• in-depth discovery to avoid wrong assumptions being made
• set budgets for individual tasks and anticipate overruns as early as possible to be able to look at alternative lower cost approaches
• ensure knowledge is spread evenly among the project team to avoid project standstill if key individuals become unavailable
• keep the code simple and well architected

Regular reviews

In our experience, open and clear communication is key for running a successful project. That is why, for active projects, we tend to suggest having monthly meetings between the project leads on both sides, to discuss progress to date and ensure the upcoming tasks are still appropriate and make adjustments as necessary.

In addition to these monthly meetings, we also recommend having quarterly review meetings where we can take a further step back and assess the project to date and discuss any new requirements or external developments.

We also do a final review towards the end of a project to reflect on how things have gone and discuss any future plans and next steps.

For clients who need more ad hoc support and ongoing maintenance, regular check-ins are less necessary but we do like having catch ups from time to time, to make sure we are providing value for money and you are happy with the work we are doing.

How we bill

If we manage to complete work in less time than estimated, we’ll charge you less. If it becomes apparent that we might need more time than originally anticipated, we’ll get together to discuss an appropriate way forward. There might be a cheaper and simpler approach we can take, we might be able to reduce the scope or postpone certain features to a later phase, or you may decide to increase the budget.

We invoice on a monthly basis for work carried out during the previous month. You can see exactly where you money has gone on your itemised invoice that links back to our issue tracker.

Over the years, we’ve found this to be the best way to ensure our work is delivered on time and to budget. If you’d like to find out more about how this works in practice, we can put you in contact with clients who can serve as references.