I quote Stephen Covey’s 5th habit, First Seek To Understand, Then to be Understood.In our first real session together I had a ton of questions. (I still do).
As previously mentioned, I had asked Chris to inventory his time so we could analyze where the biggest opportunities were for time savings.
What we learned was Chris works an average of 50 hours a week in his Web development business.
- 17.85 of those hours were in project management
- 8 hours were in designing and development.
His goal, is to get his Event Ticketing application off the ground so that he can replace his ‘hand to mouth’ project income with recurring, automated income.
But the biggest challenge for Chris, is getting enough TIME to move the project.
Working 50 hours a week, being married and having 3 kids and an (yet to be) potty trained puppy. Let’s just say life’s a little hectic for our man here. It’s not like he can just buckle down and create 10 more hours a week.
That said, reviewing his approach to project management and the processes he’s been putting in place there’s no obvious place to cut out fat. From my initial read, Chris’ systems are pretty darn tight. Although, for the record, EVERY system has waste and can always be improved.
It’s the proverbial rock & the hard place — in order to get more free time Chris needs to replace income from hands on project work, but he can’t get replacement income until he frees up more time to focus on those long term investments.
Let me ask you a (thousand) questions
During our discussion, I was probing Chris to understand his processes.
Not to challenge them. Not to change them. Although that can be the assumption. Still, in light of that exploration it’s tough for anyone to go through that scrutiny. But Chris was as open and honest about it as anyone I’ve ever worked with.
Some of the questions I was asking:
- How would you categorize your work? -project management, design, proposals, client meetings, email etc.
- How many times are you interrupted with calls or with email?
- What’s involved in your project management process?
- What questions are you asking yourself during that process? What are you looking for? Why?
- How often are you having to send work back for your outside developers to re-do? Is there one type of error you see more often than others?
- Where are these errors introduced? At the design level? A miscommunication with the developer? Lack of understanding / clarity by the developer? Developer error?
- Are their opportunities to entrust the developer with their own unit testing to confirm quality before wasting your time? If not, why not?
We explored several paths and really have only grazed the surface.
At this point, I’m not ready to make any recommendations to change what Chris is doing. Reviewing his logs, he hits the ground running and keeps a pretty good pace moving from project to project.
Ahhh but we will find places to lean out some of his systems and free up some bandwidth. We just need to keep digging bit by bit and each week will make incremental improvements.
Working the Friends and Family Network
We know it’ll take some time before we’ve made headway on our efforts to lean out his systems. So, we explored some opportunities to work the friends and family network.
A friend’s wife who used to be an executive at a company- and thus a pretty savvy business woman — had recently gone on a mini-retirement. She doesn’t need to work but she’s looking for something to do and has offered to help.
Also, he’s got a number of friends that want to pitch in as well, but just need some direction. Not to mention, anyone who’s ever worked with a volunteer work force knows that the challenge of motivating and leading them is difficult.
They are, after all, working for free.
Volunteers generally start off all fired up and ready to go. But interest and availability soon wane as their life’s commitments start pulling them away.
My rough guesstimate — we can probably look each person to give between 5-10 hours of their time before they start losing interest. We’ll either need to find a way to incentivize them beyond that through some compensation / commission opportunity OR just thank them vigorously for the time they were able to get us.
What’s Next
Chris uses Basecamp to manage all of his projects and loaded reams of great information on the project into the system.
He’s also provided me with backend access to his application prototype.
Getting to see it in person, I’m pretty excited at the opportunity here.
It’s much further along than I had anticipated. The sales materials are pretty well built out, the basic structure of the application is working. But there’s still a lot to do.
We do know there’s a lot of testing to happen on the parts that HAVE been developed.
So I could see us developing a preliminary test plan and asking the F&F Network above to test the app for us and give us feedback as to where some of the ‘holes’ are.
But, before we dive to solutions — we’ve agreed I need to come up to speed with the project plan in general - it’s history, it’s milestones, it’s original project specs, the paid resources being used, etc.
I’ll be reviewing the information Chris has given me this week and approach him with another list of questions. I’ll document these for our next update.
photo credit: John-Morgan
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