The challenge: you want a web developer who is responsive, flexible, always bringing new ideas to the table, etc. But you want your project done for a fixed fee and a set deadline. You see the rub: a project with a flexible scope is not exactly conducive to a fixed budget. Traditional (“waterfall”) methods fall short because they presume you know everything there is know about a project up-front. And no amount of discovery and planning is going to negate the good ideas that come up along the way. So ‘they’ invent the “Agile” methodology to address that. The Agile Manifest is basically four basic values:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Sounds great, right? But as you can imagine, such a flexible working situation creates huge variables in terms of how much time and effort (and ultimately cost) are required since there is never a tightly-defined scope of work. So Taoti employs a hybrid method by which we try to estimate and scope out the broad strokes for the sake of establishing a fixed timeline and budget. But then we shift to an Agile process when it comes to building out each feature of the project. It requires some give and take from both client and vendor. If there is a feature that we want to really enhance, we can do so, provided scale something else back in the project. Our project managers are great at making sure that when clients ask for enhancements, they let them know in advance if the request is going to go beyond the expected level of effort (and if so, where else in the project we might be able to shave off a bit of time to keep things on budget.)
Click to zoom in on our Watergile Process:
