How baby steps turn your project guesstimates into project bestimates

When it comes to Getting Things Done, ignorance is power. A new project lands on your plate, and it reminds of past projects, ones that had their own struggles, but they were all struggles you’ve overcome. A giant web project? Been there, done that. Another email campaign? Piece of cake.

Only knowing the broad details of a project helps you imagine it’s something familiar, and can give you and your team the motivation to plunge into it with the confidence you need. That is, until you run into those pesky details.

Let’s look at building out a form on a website. From a broad perspective, it’s just a set of fields on a page, one of many forms, and forms being one of many elements you’ll need to tie into a large web project. And it might be very tempting to guesstimate how much time that form will take. A set of fields, some basic design, it submits somewhere, just slap five hours on it and move on. But then your team starts working on the project, and eventually gets to that form. There’s back and forth with the client on what field data actually need to be captured, and those emails and phone calls take time. Maybe the form needs to track how the user landed on the form, so add some time for the programming needed to capture that information. The form needs to send an email to the user who submitted the form, plus another set of users. Oh, and it’s going into Salesforce. And wait, who’s setting it up in Salesforce? You are? You’ll need to create the custom fields in Salesforce to capture all of the form data, test the form to make sure all of the data is making it into Salesforce, and set up some rules so a Salesforce notification email gets sent to the right person. Still thinking 5 hours for that form?

Besides the advantage of a more realistic time estimate, listing everything out step by step is better for your clients as well. Sure, a short and basic description of something is easily digestible, but would you pay $30k for any project whose entirety was summed up in 2 pages? A list of detailed small steps helps to explain the complexity of a project. Baby steps are great for helping everyone involved understand what their assigned tasks are in moving the project towards completion and fabulousness, as well as helping the client to be sure everything looks and acts exactly how they want it to.

Scope bloat is a very real fear for everyone involved, and thoroughly understanding what’s involved before jumping in helps avoid unexpected additions later on down the line. I.E., figure out if your project’s forms need Salesforce from the get-go. That helps avoid that uncomfortable discussion later about if it’s your job or the clients’ job to set everything up in Salesforce later on. Planning ahead not only avoid hours for that additional labor, it also avoids hours for the additional arguing!

Ultimately, everything that is ever accomplished, ever, no matter how gigantic, is just a series of steps. And the bigger the project, the more it needs to be broken down into those baby steps. Fight the urge to guesstimate, for your sake and for the sake of your clients!