When this poll first kicked off, the “late” options were way ahead. Over time, things have evened off a bit, and the results are closer than I thought they might be.
If you are in the on time or early crowd, congrats! That means you are really good at estimating project completion times. For the rest of us, that means we should start pushing those dates back a little further than we do now. Of course, meeting deadlines is reliant upon both our working speed and our clients ability to communicate, but we are the ones issuing the completion dates, so it’s our job to anticipate these things. And you know what they say, under-promise and over-deliver.
New poll later this week.
It’s very true. Any problems I do have tend to be down to the client being a pain in the arse.
I second that. Too many times I have given the client too much credit, thinking they knew more what they were doing than they really did. Often ends up they have no idea and you just need to show them the way and stick to your guns.
I normally break a project (building a website) up in little parts and give for each part a delivery date. Like a mockupdate, first online session, different pieces of the site like main page, contact page, blog section, etc. This way i have more control over the complete project. After each section/piece the customer and i decide what the next section /piece will be and at what date the delivery will be. Customers have more influence in the process this way and changes can more easily embedded in the project. Works for me (and for clients too, so i have experienced).
Just my two cents….
I usually get them on time. I’m shocked to know that there are so many who are not :o
This isn’t a big deal but I noticed that the alt text of that image is blank which should technically not be.
Considering it’s content, you should include some message or the actual graph data in the alt or longdesc, so screen readers/rss readers can still see it.
I like your polls though, can’t wait for the next one.
There is always a pretty big gap between the date we WANT to deliver a project and the date we CAN deliver a project.
Most of the time, people tend to give the first date (when we want it to be done) to their clients in stead of the second date (when it’s actually possible to deliver a project).
Well, at least people were honest.
That’s true. And also very important: they (we?) KNOW that they are (really) late. That’s an important step to improvement.
Yay! we won…. well not really, but the moral of the story is “Underpromise, overdeliver”
Thanks for sharing, this was fun.
Yes, I always add a week to the delivery date for unforeseen situations.
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I’m proud to be almost always early! :D
I always give myself some acceptably long deadlines. It’s a marketing (I’d rather say, human relationship) principle: don’t creat expectation you can’t fulfil. People may get pissed off about you or simply think you’re not as good as they thought.