2. Tiny Smurfette Important Person (TIP), who knows a great deal about project, time, resource and human management and is eager to teach you how to use all the necessary tools to be proficient and effective.
I must admit that I was very sceptic about this whole time management thing at first. It is fairly easy to estimate the time of e.g. car assembly since everything is automated and almost perfectly synchronised. With either design or development it’s a slightly different story - there are usually more questions than answers and every single process can evolve from a simple task to 6 months of non-stop work. Fortunately there is solution to almost every problem nowadays, isn’t there.
Although I’m trying to approach each project individually there are several common stages you can clearly distinguish:
 
1Initial Steps. This is a vital part of the whole process - If you misunderstand your client now, everything may end up disastrous so I usually try to ask as many questions as possible, suggest few directions and consider even the most insane ideas. To a stranger the whole conversation may sound silly but I find this kind of me vs client “brainstorm” very helpful.
2Research. I always take some time to figure out the best way to run the project. There are many important elements that have to be checked e.g.: client’s preferences, business type, the competition approach, current trends, technology restrictions and many, many more. Ignoring this part can result in a visually good project but not competitive enough.
3Design Concepts. Depending on the given time frame and client’s budget I usually try to prepare one or two alternative design drafts to choose from and allow for different amount of revisions. Although it happens sometimes that I nailed it in the first run, coming back to the drawing board to get everything nice and perfect is more likely and I don't like cutting corners!
 
4

Skeleton Build. For every projects involving development all the fun begins at this very moment - after the design is signed off. It’s the time to gather all required coding assets and start creating functional base of the project. This is the least visual part of the whole process but do it wrong and you end up wasting hours if not days on rewriting the code or finding bugs.

5

Prototype/Beta Build.
This is the first functional build of the project - it may have visual quirks, some minor bugs, placeholder content, but it’s there!

6

Bug Fixing and Polishing. Final step - making sure that every single line of text is in place and everything works and looks as designed so it can be…

Launched and Celebrated!
 
Scrum Board
As you can see it’s not as easy as it sounds and especially with large, complex projects it can become very difficult to track all client’s requests, things to do, changes to be made, bugs to be fixed, etc., but as mentioned at the very beginning of this page - there’s solution for everything. In my case it was Devi’s convincing me to start using Scrum. It’s a fantastic way of managing complex projects by defining tasks together with actions required to complete each of them, prioritising them, scheduling and continuously reviewing to find out potential problems and delays. Since I switch to task management approach, I've been able to much more precisely predict the amount of time each job takes and that is quite often a crucial information for most of clients. And well… it saved me few times now from going barking mad so I honestly recommend using it. Thank you D!