The Staying Sane Guide to Communicating with Developers

Vishal here back with more quick tips to add profit to your day.

One of the biggest headaches our clients tell us about is poor communication with developers. They ask for one thing to be done and get something completely different back.

So, if you’re facing the same battle; here’s a 5 Step Communication Plan to Double their Productivity in 48 hours or less!

Step #1 – Work with an Organized Project Management System

You definitely want to pick a very, very organized project management system.  I’ve seen some really successful entrepreneurs rely on just email communication between them and their developers, which is very ineffectively, because files get lost, communications get lost, it gets misunderstood, there’s no visibility.  You want to pick a very organized project management system.  The system we use, which we really like, is Teamwork Project Manager.  It’s very much like Base Camp.

Step #2 – Divide the Project into Smaller Segments

When you work on a project, you want to make sure to divide it into small segments, small tasks.  You can then upload those projects in small tasks, assigned to different people.  You can put milestones, you can put delivery dates, and that really helps to stay organized.

Make sure the developer also knows exactly what is expected of him.  Divide the project into small tasks and upload it into the system.

Step #3 – Give Visual Instructions

This is very important.  We also guide and encourage our clients to do this, and it works really well.  Most of the developers get a really good idea of what you’re trying to achieve, if they get visual instructions.  If you send out really long emails explaining what you want to get done, most of the time, no matter how good the developer is, something gets missed.

The best way to ensure that it always is done correctly is use some software.  We use one called Jing, it’s free (TechSmith – Jing).  We encourage our clients to do quick 3 to 4 minute screen capture videos, and explain what they’re trying to achieve in the task.  If you want to go 1 step further, you can take a screen capture picture of your website, and put arrows and tell them exactly what you want changed.  Using the combination of videos and pictures, 99% of the time developers will come back with exactly what you had asked for.  That works extremely well.

Step #4 – Prioritize Clearly to Your Developers

You want to make sure you give a very clear priority of order to your developers.  What you don’t want to do as an entrepreneur is assume the developer will know exactly what your business priorities are, what projects you’re working on, what projects you want to get done tomorrow or a week later.

Step #5 – Ask Developers to Follow Up on Tasks and Priorities

Every day or every week, whatever frequency you choose, you want to make sure you give them priority 1 task A, priority 2 task B, priority 3 task C…

Then ask them that at the end of the day to send you a small email through the project management system, and comment on each task, and each priority, what got done, what’s in progress, and what’s still pending.

SIMPLE STUFF, but I promise you, put it to use and you’ll experience a lot less disappointments, especially when you’re working with an overseas worker.

Talk soon!

Vishal.

PS: Here’s how we helped this client:

“Managing over a dozen freelancers across the would was horrendous. It was an absolute nightmare. I would never build a business around that again. Partnering with DedicatedDevelopers.com is completely the opposite. With our dedicated developer we save around 40 to 50 hours a month and we’re producing $2,000.00 or more a week in additional revenue. I can’t recommend them highly enough.” Jovan Will