02 April 2010
Posted in
Project Planning & Management
Even with companies like ours, who handle most of the development for you, there is still a lot of work that goes into account management and planning before, during and after the site is built and many designers wind up eating a ton of time in this area because they didn't know how to anticipate or sell the amount of PM time they need.
Here's an excerpt from The Dev Department's Web Designer Certification program that might help:
Development Project & Account Management
With regular developers, you normally would need to monitor development status and scope as the development progresses. However, if you follow the process laid out here, you should be able to develop the planning documents, deliver them to The Dev Department, and forget about the project for a week or two until it is time to review.
However, there could be questions to answer during that time. Your mark-up on our development cost should cover this, but you might choose to add extra hours for this.
Another option is to add a percentage mark-up to all hours estimated to cover this. This is advantageous to a single line item as clients are often hesitant to pay for this as a single activity but will not notice a slight increase in hours. 10% to 20% is a safe percentage for this.
Development Review
The Dev Department thoroughly tests your site before we deliver a beta to you for review, but there will always be some small things for you to check. So, we advise you leave yourself at least 1 to 3 hours to read over the site and input To-Do items into Basecamp (the project management portal that we use). Note: For more complex sites, you may put in as many as 5 to 7 hours.
Client Review
You will want to consider a few hours for reviewing with the client and inputting client revisions into Basecamp.
Another important tip is that, the bigger the project, the more the time you will spend on understanding details from the client and communicating with the developers.
If you'd like to learn more, check out our FREE certification program.
