A few days ago, I got my first status report from my development team and gladly, we are making some progress.....I think!. This status report and the conversations leading up to it raised a few issues over the last few days.
The way the payment for the work is set-up, I pay my developers after they complete a few milestones. We had talked in passing about what "complete" meant for me but it never occurred to me to really stress that conversation until I saw the payment plan. One of my major goals is to not repeat one of the major mistakes I made the first two times I tried building this system. The mistake - pay for incomplete work. So while a development team may consider working code as "complete", a business owner typically needs more than working code to sell their product. Speaking specifically in my situation, I define complete as:
1. Working code/functionality deployed to the live environment ( i.e the site the end user is going to visit) and suitable for end user consumption.
- So if I am not comfortable showing the working functionality to my end users, either because the aesthetics is lacking for example, then the work is not done.
- This is to ensure that should I need to fire the current development team, a new development team has some information to go off when trying to understand the system.
The other issue that came up was that I realized that I was not clear on what my expectations were from a status report. I assumed they read my minds, even though I had mentioned it in passing as well - I need to be able to verify the work you claim has been done, per the status report. In other words, I need a site to test out functionality that the development team reports as done. The first status report did not come with the ability for me to verify the work that was reported as done so I will have to stress my expectations in future conversations.
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