One of the key elements of a successful business is ensuring you deliver what you promised to the customer on time and do exactly what you promised them it would when you took the order. This isn’t always easy, as there are many pitfalls and hurdles that you need to navigate to make sure this happens. In fact, there are some points during the progress of any project where you might think that you are completely lost in the woods and you’ll never going to succeed. However, by concentrating on a few key areas, you can make sure they deliver on time
Break the project into bitesize pieces
This might seem an obvious starting point, but at the same time, many projects are still viewed in their entirety or not broken into small enough sections. How you deal with this will vary slightly according to which businesses you are in and the size of the project.
However, breaking each task down into something that a small team can complete in a deadline of less than a month will give people a more manageable task to get their head around – and stop those gifted people in your workforce who tend to procrastinate from leaving too much until the last minute.
Know your budget
While you’re breaking down each of these tasks into bite-sized chunks, you also need to assign a budget to each. Many projects a stalled because they have used up all of their budgets by the time you’ve only got three-quarters of the way through the process, and assigning more funds can sometimes be a very long, drawn out, and less than pleasant activity for everybody involved.
Assigning costs can be done more accurately by working with the people performing the tasks, as they can be more realistic than being given some number by a person in finance, and finding out the hard way it’s simply not enough.
Managing APIs
Everybody uses APIs even though they probably don’t realize it. An API is an application programming interface that means two applications can talk to one another, and managing these effects can be a key element in delivering a project on time.
By looking for the right API management solutions, you can do much to help developer productivity and also make the process of getting more developers onboard easier if you need to ramp things up to meet a deadline.
Everybody knows their job
Another key element is making sure everybody knows where they fit in by using good communication and organizational charts so that everybody knows who they report to – and where to go for help if they are falling behind with their own particular task.
Another element here is that you need to be aware of what everybody does and make sure that you have the best possible person to carry out each task, rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It also makes things easier if you need to go outside the business and use a freelancer to plug the gaps in any knowledge your organization has.
To wrap everything up
Delivering products on time is essential when it comes to building client trust and developing your reputation in the industry so that you can get more work.
In addition, getting organized so that you can deliver a project on time prevents unwanted stress in your business due to unrealistic deadlines, or having teams have to take shortcuts to deliver already overdue work.