Thursday, 04 December 2008
You may need different web development services. You may need to have a simple website or complicated custom web service. But the first thing you and your web developers should take care of is making up a proper specification requirements document.
90% of clients we deal with have a very approximate understanding of what they need and sometimes they have a brief with short description of the functionality. Many clients ignore specification requirements document. First of all it happens because usually this is a piece of work that they should pay for if their project is quite big. The cost of proper specification requirements can be up to 10% of the project cost. And if the client is not sure yet whether he will work with the company he is not willing to pay for making up a detailed requirements document. Some clients avoid making up specification requirements because they are in a hurry and have very tight deadlines.
Lack of specification requirements is one of the main reasons for so called «Client VS Developer War». Such war means that client wants to get what he should get from his point of view. And web developer wants to deliver what should be delivered from his point of view. As you understand there will be rarely a winner in this war and nobody will be satisfied at the end.
But not only the clients who ignore specification development! Sometimes even reliable and big web development companies do not follow the rules. Usually it happens with bigger projects when sale managers do everything to get the contract, advance payment and then web development team will take care of everything else. We believe this is a wrong approach and this is one of the reasons why so many promising IT projects never get done.
At Inspirativ we decided to make up a specification requirements document for free if it takes up to a day of work. Such service already had some positive effect, because new clients appreciate the opportunity to get to know us better before they decide to hire us.
Be careful and take your web development projects seriously. And take care of the requirements specification document. Always.
Why do we post our notes?
Our notes are mainly intended for our potential clients. These notes will be also helpful to people who would like to get their website done and they don’t have much experience working with web development companies.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about our notes or would like to give us your feedback.