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by Swannie 5613 days ago
This is a one written by a friend, on SitePoint:

The Principles Of Project Management http://www.sitepoint.com/books/project1/

When you say development house, do you mean software house - as in doing development work for other companies? Or developing their own product? A very important distinction to make...
1 comments
rvb 5613 days ago
Actually, both; developing for other companies is a way to pay the bills and gain exposure to new things, but the ultimate goal is to make our own stuff.

So definitely, processes for communicating and dealing with clients are things we'd like to hear about.

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Swannie 5613 days ago
Ahh. OK. Making your own stuff is easier in many ways.

However I'd suspect that with 3 - 4 years experience, with team and time management issues are far from the biggest problem. If they're going into a small development house, lacking in experience of external facing tasks, particularly "managing the customer" will be an even greater problem.

External issues such as: * running a sales cycle (is there work here? how do we get the work? what type of tender are they putting out, if any? what response do they want? who are we competing against? how early can we get paid?)

* negotiating statements/scope of work, prior to even discussing high level requirements, and placing a realist budget for the scope

* getting sign-off from the customer on deliverables

* raising invoices, chasing invoices, getting PAID before the customer's budget dissapears when they flip into the next financial year

* getting paid before handing over the next deliverable

* having the cajones to threaten to pull out when you're 80% done, $100k down, and waiting for a month on a cheque for $50k (so you can pay your developers)

* managing expectations of post-handover support and bug-fix

* change requests

* managing internal client politics, where your main contact is for/against you, and their manager is the complete opposite, so that you can get sign off

All of that is harder than managing a few programmers! :P Sadly I don't know any book that describes that side of the business. It's one that often gets left to the project manager, and they all too often drop the ball.

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rvb 5613 days ago
I think we've encountered all of these issues already :) Definitely would appreciate any resources for them that people can suggest.
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