Development & Project Management
💡 Lets talk about how handle your development phase and manage your team to work fast and efficiently!
Managing a Developer
This can be a nightmare if not done properly. The last thing you want is to have to fire your developer half way through a project and hire a new one.
This will cause significant delay.
Of course, not everything will be in our control, but lets do as much as we can to improve our chances of a successful project build in a timely manner.
Communication
This is where you are most likely to get burned. Communication is what really separates a good developer from a great one.
I personally like to make contact with them at least once per day. Often times, they are in a complete opposite time zone as me so this will either be in the morning or at night.
As far as meetings go, I have 1 once per week on Monday to go over everything about the project, discuss problems that come up, delays, progress, etc..
If you are not that tech savvy, you should have these meetings more often maybe twice a week just to make sure everything is moving along as it should and you understand where everything is at.
Watch for more insight into managing developers…
Project Management Tool
This will be dependent on your personal preferences but I will share what we do when it comes to tools we use.
At our agency we use Trello. It is very simple for everyone to use and is your standard Kanban style PM board. We have just found it is the easiest to use.
But here are some other options you can use.
For the more tech savvy (and if you are coding your SaaS) I recommend you use github projects.
This way you can directly link your codebase to the PM board and it is much easier to manage your project and make specific references to it.
Tracking Hours
This is another tricky thing to tackle and is important to stay on top of so you aren’t getting taken advantage of.
Upwork provides a tool that automatically handles this for you. You just have to make sure you do not have manual hour logging turned on.
If you are using time tracker it will help mitigate the risk of being over charged. This takes random screenshots of their screen 6 times per hour so you can get a good idea of if they are actually working when they say they are.
You can also try 3rd party tools like Toggl.
Of course, this is one of the many benefits when working directly with us, and our clients can attest, is that you don’t have to worry about any of this as we will take care of the entire project for you.
Allowing you to be as hands on or hands off as you would like.
To find out more about how we handle development at WGMI Labs book a Discovery Call with me!