Developing software is an extremely time consuming process, requiring long hours of uninterrupted focus on the technical task at hand. That coupled with constantly learning new technologies, analysing requirements, designing, documenting,  coding, debugging, testing, installing etc. makes software development a stressful and difficult job. But no matter how difficult the job, for certain types of people the process of imagining something and bringing it to life from nothing proves to be work that is incredibly rewarding and self satisfying. Most successful software developers that I’ve met over the years love coding and most cannot imagine doing anything else with their lives.

Before I started working as a software developer professionally, I  remember spending hours sitting at my computer for hours on end writing code just for fun, without any interruptions or any other worries. When I was done my code had no bugs whatsoever and by that measure the code was perfect. If I wanted to implement another feature, I would just start coding it right away. The only limits were my own imagination. However, after I started working as a software consultant for a few years I noticed a few things that would kill the joy of coding. It’s for these reasons that many developers end up changing careers or at the very best keep switching between jobs in the hope of finding a light at the end of tunnel i.e. bringing joy back into coding.

The truth is that if you want to enjoy your career in the real world, you cannot continue sticking your head in the sand and pretend that you’re just a coding geek, and ignore the business aspects. You may not enjoy getting involved in the business aspects of software, but as the saying goes, “if you can’t beat them, join them” and believe me when I tell you that you definitely cannot beat the business people for the simply reason that they are pragmatic realists while most coding geeks are idealists with their heads in the cloud … or sand or whatever else geeky developers put their heads in. As George Carlin once said “Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist.” Continuing on a path of avoiding business meetings will turn you into a disappointed and grumpy pessimist, ending up complaining to your grandkids over Christmas dinner about how unfair the world is. So you may as well join the business people and turn yourself into a pragmatic realist that somehow always seems to find a solution where others see only problems.

Here’s some advise for getting involved in the business side of things. It all starts with managing ongoing costs of projects. Firstly, every software project has three components that need to be managed and there isn’t a single business meeting in which these components are not brought up:

• Money: in the real world, people need to put food on the table, bills need to be paid and companies need to make a profit otherwise they go out of business. For this reason every little thing needs to have a monetary value assigned to it. So if you have an idea for a feature you’d like to develop, you cannot just start coding it because someone needs to pay for your time and effort. Your customer/boss will only pay for you to do it if it provides an ROI (Return On Investment) to the company i.e. a financial benefit the company gets from having this feature/application developed. Therefore before you start coding, you first have to create a proposal, estimate costs, prepare an ROI analysis, present it to the customer and wait for approval. Depending on the costs, complexity of the project and other factors this process could take a week, a month, a year, or it might never get approved (probably because your proposal sucked).
• Time: regardless of whether you’re billing by the hour or you’re getting paid a flat salary, your time is being paid for. Therefore any feature or app you are developing must have a time constraint assigned to it because time equals money. To make matters worse, there are deadlines imposed by the customer because they need it by a certain date. If that’s not bad enough, you’re competing with other software companies, and so in order to win a contract, you’ll then have your salesman promising the customer (on your behalf) that you will in fact delivery the finished software in half the time for a fraction of the money that other companies are offering it for. While you’re still standing there dealing with the shock and horror of the situation, the salesman will then turn around and spew out motivational quotes to you which he heard at some sales seminar that he went to last week … or maybe he’ll just quote Barack Obama by saying “Yes, we can!”.
• People: the more people are involved in a project the more politics you can expect. That’s just a fact of life. The reason being that different types of people have different agendas with different incentives in their job. So once again, before you get to write any code, people need to agree on what this code needs to do and how it needs to do it, how long it’s going to take, what budget is going to be allocated to the project and who is going to handle which work. Going forward you can expect millions of emails, phone calls, conference calls and endless recurring meetings that will make want to pull your hair out … assuming you have any hair left to pull out. Throughout this process both functional and technical specifications need to be written up which essentially serve as contracts for what will be delivered as the finished software to the customer.

You would think that people would be aware of all the above, but most people, especially inexperienced or non-technical stakeholders, somehow still believe that software projects are purely about just writing code. They either fail to foresee all the above mentioned factors or they simply choose to stick their heads in the sand and not learn from past mistakes. So they typically end up quoting purely for the time required to write the code, thereby setting up unrealistic expectations with the customers. On the customers’ end, it goes without saying that most customers are not software people and therefore never expect to pay for anything other than the time required to write code.

When these naive people inevitably run into these problems they throw their toys out the cot, arguments ensue which lead to meltdowns and they just generally become stressed out and unhappy with life. Many of the software companies then end up going out of business because of failed projects or loss of money due to time that was never billed for.

In order to to survive in this industry and avoid projects going pear shaped, you have to start managing expectations. Expectations translate into managing money, time and people and it all starts with the first quote to the customer. A million questions will arise when doing the first quote on a project. Here are some examples:

• “Should we quote for emails, phone calls, meetings and other project management related work?”
• “What if the customer refuses to pay for anything other than purely coding time?”
• “Should we then just act like a charity and give that work away for free?”
• “What percentage of the project do we spend doing project management versus time spent developing software?”
• “What if unexpected things go wrong and the costs go up?”
• “What if the customer keeps changing their requirements resulting in scope creep?”
• “Should we then quote for requirements analysis and documentation work?”
• “Will our competitors be cheaper than us because they’re not quoting for all the above?”
• “What if our competitors undercut us by deliberately underestimating the time and effort required and oversimplifying the customers’ requirements?” This happens on a regular basis by the way. Many sales people do this because they know that once they get started on a project the customer will not be able to simply turn back if the project ends up costing more than what was originally quoted for. This approach is like the drug dealer sales approach i.e. the first one’s free, after that we’ll nail you.
• “If that happens, will the customer be experienced enough to realise that they’re being played by our competitors and that in the long term it will eventually cost them more than they bargained for?”
• “Should we then preempt the competitors’ tactics and deliberately under quote just so we can get the deal i.e. should we stoop to our competitors’ level?”

These are all difficult and valid questions to ask yourself before quoting on a project. What I can tell you though, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that if you’re only charging for purely coding time, your company will inevitable go out of business. The reason being that in my experience at least 50% of the work required on most projects excludes coding time.

So what is the best way to quote and bill then?

• Wrong sales approach: Under quote and over bill i.e. the drug dealer sales approach. As mentioned above, most inexperienced sales people will under quote and over bill in this manner and most inexperienced customers will accept these quotes, which unfortunately perpetuates these bad practices i.e. people learning from bad examples. This approach is equivalent to over promising and under delivering in terms of costing. There are all sorts of other problems which this approach can create:
  • By quoting for purely coding work and/or cutting the budget, you are cutting the time on the project, thereby putting unnecessary pressure on the developers who will end up taking shortcuts in their code, resulting in massive amounts of technical dept being accrued. In the long run, the project will end up costing way more anyway. Hence I say that you would be putting yourself and/or other developers under unnecessary pressure.
  • It goes without saying that taking shortcuts leads to lower quality code being produced and the software being filled with bugs.
  • Due to the low quality code and over-budget costs, your reputation will end up being tarnished in process. So even if you end up finishing the project successfully, that very same customer will most likely never call you again for the next project.
  • In the end it really comes down to the customer getting what they pay for. That being the reason for many internal and enterprise products only being as good as they need to be i.e. sales people undercutting competitors, underestimating requirements and customers being cheap and shortsighted.
• Right sales approach: Over quote and under bill: it’s always difficult to estimate the costs and timelines of a project. For this reason and all the reasons mentioned above, I have found the best strategy to be as follows:
  • Sales meetings: During your first sales meeting/s with the customer, get a sense of the their requirements. You don’t need to get into too many details about every custom single business rule and how exactly each feature will be developed. The reason being that the customer is not paying for these sales meetings. Hence you don’t want to spend too much time doing the analysis and design work before any payments have been made or approvals have been granted i.e. you do not want to work for free. Furthermore, it can often happen that you’ll go through a long and rigorous analysis phase, designing and fully documenting a proposed solution only later to find out that the customer took your design to a competitor and ended up paying them for only their coding time. You may or may not be surprised to know that this in fact happens quite often. If you do this enough times your company will end up going out of business. The purpose of the sales meetings should only be to:
    • Sales Pitch: Pitch yours and the company’s services to the customer. The main aim of your first sales meeting should simply be to prove your competence and skills to the customer.
    • Requirements Overview: get an overview of their requirements for the software they’re looking to develop. Don’t get bogged down into specifics. The specifics should be left up to the analysis phase when the customer is actually paying for your time.
    • Proposal: put together a proposal for the solution you plan on implementing. This proposal should not be a functional and especially not a technical specification. There should be no mention of specific features or technical details of how the software will be developed.
      • Technical Information: from a technical perspective it should only provide an overview of the technologies (hardware, frameworks, SDKs and programming languages) you plan on utilising to provide the solution. You can  provide them with generic architecture diagrams, but don’t spend too much time creating custom diagrams that are specific to their business.
      • Solution Benefits: you should mention the benefits of implementing such a solution. This could be an increase in productivity, accuracy, automation etc.
      • Costing: this is the tough part that most people get wrong. Only through experience will it become easier to prepare costing estimates.
        • Development Costs: firstly, you need to think of the time required to develop the software by breaking down the tasks. If you’re using XP and Agile, these could be your stories or whatever you like to call them. If you’ve done similar projects in the past it will be easy to make an estimate. However for features that you’ve never implemented before, I would advise you to always be conservative i.e. think about the time required for research, testing debugging etc. If you’re not the one developing the software, this process will be become even more difficult in which case you will need to speak to the developers and get estimates from them.
          • Developer Confidence: Keep in mind that you cannot just take the developers’ estimates at face value. The reason being that some developers provide optimistic estimates, while others provide pessimistic estimates and this is based on their confidence, which may or may not necessarily have anything to do with their actual skill level. Confident developers typically tend to under estimate the time and effort required for coding, while under confident developers will overestimate time and effort.
          • Code Sloppiness: Some developers can be incredible quick to write code but they code can be sloppy. For such developers, you need to add buffer time for them to go back to refactor and debug etc. Others are perfectionists and take really long to code, but when their work is done it’s actually done. Therefore, you need to take all of this into account on the overall costing.
          • Buffer Time: Once you’ve come up with a fair estimate, it is best to always add a further buffer by multiplying the estimated hours with a factor. This factor is something of gut feeling you get through experience. For example, suppose a developer gives you an estimate of 10 days of development, you could then multiply that by 1.5, thereby your estimate to the customer being 15 days. The reason for this buffer is to take into account unexpected issues that can and do always pop up. Some may say that allocating extra time encourages procrastination, but I think that’s non-sense because it is the project manager’s job to check on up progress and ensure that people are meeting their timelines.
          • Do not quote on details: when quoting for development work, do not make the mistake of separating and displaying costs for every little coding task e.g. do not quote for each and every single button that they want on a form. Instead group the costs together and have only one or two development line items on the quote. The reasoning behind this is because you do not want the customer interrogating you about every single line item e.g. “Why would it take 8 hours to develop a single button.” The purpose of not quoting on details is not to be dishonest about the costs, but rather to avoid having technical debates with a customer that isn’t technical i.e. the customer has no idea how much work goes behind implementing the logic of that specific button and therefore to the customer it just looks like a simple button, while there could be 2000 lines of code behind that button for it to do what it’s supposed to do.
        • Project Management Costs: think about all the time that will be spent on the phone, writing emails, in meetings and driving around to those meetings. You must also take into account the kind of people the customers are when making this estimate. If your customers are professionals that know exactly what they want and they themselves plan ahead, then the project management costs can be reduced. However, you will have customers that know very little about software projects, are unprofessional, will constantly change their minds about what they want and the goal posts and timelines will constantly change. For unprofessional customers, I’d advise you to increase the project management costs substantially because you’re going to be doing a lot of baby sitting.
        • Analysis Costs: this is the time required for you to sit in workshops and meetings to discuss and finalise requirements and write up documentation. This time needs to be paid for because at least a third of your project will involve analysis work. It is for this reason that you should never make the mistake of starting the analysis phase before presenting the proposal and getting the customer’s go-ahead on the project.
      • ROI Analysis: finally once you’ve come up with a final number for the costing of a project, you then need to sell it against a value you’re providing to the customer’s business i.e. you need to give your customer a financial reason to spend the money on doing the project. Simply listing reasons is not going to cut it. Your motivation for doing the project needs to be have financials attached to it and that is typically the ROI (Return On Investment) calculation. In most cases, customers will already know why they want the software implemented, that being the reason why they called you in to take on the project. However, that may not always be the case, especially in cases when you are the one approaching them. In such cases you need to show the customer that doing the project will be an investment in their business and like any investment it must have a return/payback in a certain amount of time. So for example, if the project costs will be $100 000, you need to show the customer that the software will reduce costs in other areas of their business thereby enabling them to save X amount of money every month.  Those savings will amount to the total investment in a certain amount of time and that will be your final ROI payback period. Going forward the customer will continue to save for as long as they continue using your solution. In other words, the purpose of an ROI calculation is to establish a win-win deal with the customer whereby you earn money from the project implementation and the customer wins even more in savings over time. Selling based on ROI is the most difficult kind of sale you can make because you will need to have a thorough understanding of the customer’s business in order to put together an ROI calculation. However this kind of sale is also the most rewarding because instead of selling based on billable hours, you’re selling based on the value your software solution provides. It always helps if you are already familiar with the specific industry that the customer is in. If not, then you will be required to do a lot of research into the industry. Either way you will need to ask the customer a multitude of questions regarding their business before you can understand how to solve their problems and cut their costs.
    • Project inception: once you’ve presented the proposal to the customer you can expect to have a few backwards and forwards rounds of meetings and discussions about the proposal. Do not make the mistake of starting a project without the go-ahead from the customer. If it is a new customer that you’ve never dealt with in the past, I would advise you get a formal approval in written form from the customer. This can take the form of a PO (Purchase Order) or otherwise some sort of a signed contract.
    • Analysis and Specification Documents: it is only at this stage once you’ve gotten the go-ahead from the customer that you can start working. However, it is still not time to start coding just yet.
      • Project Plan: First and foremost you need to put a project plan together. The project plan will consist of the timelines of when each project deliverable (feature/work) will be completed and which resources (people) will be working on those deliverables. Both you and the customer need to agree on the project plan and the timelines need to be in line/comparable to the project costing in your proposal.
      • Functional and/or Technical Specifications: included in the project plan should be time allocated for analysis work and writing up the functional and/or technical specification. This phase of the project will involve having workshops and meetings to discuss the requirements of the software. Throughout this process, you will document the requirements in a formal specification document.  Many developers will say that documentation is a waste of time, but in the business world these documents will essentially server two purposes:
        • Contract for work required: The specifications will serve as a contract for what the customer can expect of the software. No more and no less than what is specified in the document will be delivered to the customer for the agreed upon price. It is for this reason that many software companies only quote the customer after the analysis phase, because they will say that they cannot quote for the project without fully understanding all the project requirements in detail. However, remember that I mentioned that in the costing process you should always add a buffer i.e. allocate extra budget and time for unexpected costs. This buffer that you added in your costing should cover any unexpected work that is being requested during the analysis phase and it will also protect you from doing the analysis phase at the risk of not getting paid for this work.
        • Mitigating scope creep: without a specification in place, the customer can continue asking for changes and you will end up spending way more time on the project than you initially anticipated all the while the customer is getting all this additional work for free.
    • Billing:  Many software companies bill only at the end of the project with an agreement in place that the customer only pays once the project has been completed and the solution has been implemented and tested. This is a huge mistake. The reason being that the customer will be under the impression that the project costs you presented in the proposal are a flat fee and in such a scenario the customer will not take into account the accruing costs of changing requirements, calling you in for additional meetings etc. All of that can land you in a mountain of scope creep costing your company ridiculous amounts of money. Hence it is important to:
      • Bill actual hours not estimated hours:  It is crucial to make the customer understand that the costing you did in the proposal are only estimated costs and that they will be billed the actual hours worked instead of these estimated hours. This clearly tells the customer that it will not be a flat fee for the project, but instead can change based on changes in the requirements. If you added a buffer to the budget (over estimated costs) in your proposal, the customer will end up being pleasantly surprised when the costs of the project are less than the estimated costs. However, if the customer continuously asks for changes throughout the project even after the specification document has been agreed on, these changes will be handled as CCRs (Change Control Requests) which fall outside the scope of the initial specification. The CCRs must be paid for and given enough of these CCRs the total cost of the project will end up going over the initial costing in the proposal. Having these mechanisms in place will encourage the customer to think twice before asking for changes to the initial agreement and will protect you against scope creep.
      • Bill in cycles: Bill the customer for the hours worked in continuous cycles e.g. monthly or even every two weeks. The developers and other resources on the project will then have to keep track of their hours worked and ensure that the costs are not going over budget. If the costs do end up running over budget, either because your initial estimation in the proposal was wrong or because of CCRs, the customer must be alerted of it and approval must be gotten from the customer before continuing with the project.

Keeping all of the above in mind, here’s a summary of golden rules to follow in order to manage the costs of a project.

1. Always over quote and under bill instead of under quote and over bill.
2. Do not get into too many details in the sales cycle i.e. when drawing up the proposal and estimating the costs of the project.
3. Bill actual hours worked instead of estimated hours: Explain to customers that the quote is purely an estimation and that they will be billed actual hours worked rather than estimated hours. Explain to them that if there are no change requests, they can most likely expect the total cost to be less than the estimated cost in the initial proposal.
4. Never work for free: aside from the sales meetings, proposal and costing, no other work should be done for free without formal approval from the customer. Even after the project has started, any change requests must be paid for.