How to find out what clients want even if they already have told you, let’s find out…
Evaluation purpose
The presale stage evaluation is the most frequent cause of our company that is focused on the successful selling of the client’s service. The evaluation during the development stage aims at forecasts of the iteration and functional volume that has to be implemented.
The characteristics of the optimal evaluation process:
- quick
- accurate
- without unnecessary actions
- complete
- marketable
The process of evaluation has to be passed as quickly as possible in order to:
- a customer doesn’t get tired of waiting
- an enterprise could pay employees for the time that they spend on evaluation (the client won’t pay for it)
- valuable company’s resource stays busy and does not take tasks that don’t make a direct profit
Without unnecessary actions
- ping-pong dialogue between client, sales manager, and the developer that provides the evaluation shall be minimized as far as possible
- for that purpose, it is necessary to adhere to the format of evaluation record-keeping using the templates for the records and follow the order of its flow
Evaluation should be done highly accurate, without unfounded figures that can deter the client.
Evaluation should be done completely to avoid the monetary loss and extra expenses for unaccounted parts which were missed during the evaluation.
Evaluation of the project should have marketable properties for clients, in other words, evaluation should follow “easy to sell” rules:
- doesn’t have overly detailed descriptions (don’t allow customers to find fault with figures.)
- thorough enough to fit the customers expect, at least have the same tasks partitioning that was submitted in his requirements
- company’s sales manager and evaluator should have enough arguments to defeat their evaluation
Evaluated scope adjustments
Before the evaluation starts it’s important to take into account that manager has to be able to provide direction to the developer in the context of development style and also evaluation details and accuracy the client lists in project requirements:
- the fast delivery of particular functionality and making feedbacks (that allows us to exclude the mistake processing system in the app, autotests, etc. from the scope.)
- the delivery of the required functionality with regression minimization (autotests needed and etc.)
- is the test data valid (dummy data) for carrying out the demo?
- what’s the minimum duration of the evaluation (1 hour, 8 hours, week, month)?
- and so on in the same way
The main rule is that the client, manager, and developer have to be focused on the general vision of what scope does the client expects and will be evaluated, even if in the initial documentation records and requirements don’t contain enough details.
It is good to focus on important details and keep in mind the client’s background. It will be better to divide the app by functional side if the client has a technical background rather than the execution of the tasks, which will be optimal if the client doesn’t have any technical background.
The project technical assignment analysis and formulating proposals to the client that has the time evaluation
Technical assignment types
Generally, all technical tasks that evaluator have to make deal with, belong to one of the two categories. This is a fairly conditional division, but it helps the evaluator to choose thinking direction and kinds of expecting additional efforts. So, there are:
- developer-oriented technical assignments
- the amount of technical (engineering) details are huge enough, the most part of the description is completed on the developers language
- includes mock-ups or demo versions of the future functionality that need to be released
- may refer to various technologies that are recommended or necessary to apply to release the required functionality
- technical assignments oriented to the client’s requirements
- mostly contain the description of the product (the client’s vision of it)
- more informal descriptions instead of formal specifications
- there are no recommendations or instructions on what technologies have to be applied
Technical assignment processing
Certainly, the actual technical assignment contains characteristics of both different lists in varying degrees. But for technical assignments oriented to the client’s requirements more effort should be made in order to:
- cover how the functionality will work based on the client description as much as possible
- provide specific technical solutions for the functionality implementation
- develop one or several alternative solutions for each disputable and confusing point of requirements
- offer a description of a complex solution to the client by selecting the realization the simplest in implementation and the most cost-effective way in the context of resources and time for each subtask (look at the previous paragraph)
