Developers and Designers at NMK: a Thought-Provoking Evening

I had great fun being on the panel at the New Media Knowledge Developers and Designers Event in London a couple of weeks ago. There was lots of very informed conversation, but something one of my fellow panelists, Chris Heilmann said really struck me. He said that one of the big problems that we face is that people don't really understand the internet. And made me think that I want to understand it better.

And by "understand" I don't think he meant knowing all about TCP/IP and HTTP and all that. I think he meant that many people who commission websites don't have a good understanding about what websites do, how the people who run a website interact with the people who visit the website.

Some people are sniffy about the phrase "Web 2.0", implying that it's nothing more than a re-hashing and re-branding of the internet of the pre-2000 dot com bust. But the truth is, it's a very different animal. The phrase "Web 2.0" covers some truly amazing ideas such as permanent beta, folksonomies and the Google-ization of the web. Nobody really fully understands them (may not even Chris!). There's shouldn't be any shame in admitting that either - none of this stuff existed at all 12 years ago! But the more we understand, the more we can communicate our understanding to our customers, the better.

Pitcher's Poker - Part 3

So the talent and skill of you and your team shone through and you won the pitch. Now what?

You have to write a specification. Write the specification as a set of stories. Get together as many of the customers as you can find. Who would be using this? Who's paying for it? Who will look at it before payment gets sign off. Get the customers to prioritize the list. What if the customer says "I don't need to prioritize the list, you've agreed to deliver all of it."?

Well, one thing you can do is prioritize the list for them. Do the best you can to read your customer's mind and then get them to comment on your prioritized list. But then, that's as far as you can go without getting their input. If they still won't agree to help you prioritize the list, then take up thy laptop and walk. In Pitcher's Poker, you can't negotiate meaningfully unless you're willing to fold. Yes, that's right. Tell them that it's been nice doing business with them, but you're a professional. This is information that you know you need from them in order to do your job properly. If they can't give it to you, you can't work with them.

Pitcher's Poker - Part 2

If after thinking about the stuff in part 1, you're still in the pitch, look across the table. Stop thinking about yourself for a second and think about your customer. How well does this fixed-price pitching work for them? If you really know about Agile methods, you know that a successful fixed price, fixed effort, fixed scope project is just not possible. From your client's point of view there are three possibilities. (1) they don't know that - in which case, they've probably had lots of unpleasant experiences of buying software development in the past, (and are probably about to have another one), (2) they do know that and are confident they can bully and cajole you into delivering everything they want for the initial price with as much extra free effort from you and your colleagues as it takes or (3) they have a contingency budget that they are not telling you about because they know from experience that fixed price work always leads to either cutting the original specification or paying more to get what was on the original (in this scenario they are beginning to play with notions of iteration even if they don't know it as such). Which of these is it? Maybe it's a bit of all three. It would be good to know.

Pitcher's Poker - Part 1

"But most of our work is fixed price work that we bid for. How are we going to get our clients to this Agile working? They'd never go for it."

What's your first move? Your first move is to know how much projects like this have cost you in the past. What did you say you could do the project for? What did it actually cost? If you know this information, then the chances are that you won't even be pitching. If you really knew the costs of pitching and delivering fixed-price projects, you'd be doing something else. Like spending that money in a sales effort to find customers who don't ask you to pitch, or pay you for your pitching.

If you haven't started counting the cost of pitching for fixed-price jobs, you should start now.