I have been looking forward to Google Wave and I was excited to at last have my invite. I got signed up and imported my contact list and created a wave and then.... then.... well... in the words of the dinosaur in the animated movie Meet the Robinsons, "I've got tiny arms and a huge head... I'm not sure you thought this plan through very well." Ok, not the tiny arms part, but this whole invitation thing, while a neat way to create Internet buzz in the lighting world of social media, doesn't really lend itself to useful testing - at least not for a company.

Sure, I'm seeing a few folks in my contact list who have a wave account. They are mostly tech savvy developers. I know I could create a wave and collaborate with them. But what I really need is to be able to roll my company developers and select customers into a wave for testing. I'm not trying to chat about the weather or review movies. If I want to waste time I can Facebook or Twitter. Instead I'm trying to see if the new wave paradigm can enhance my current project management processes (maybe even supersede some of them). I sent out a passel of invites but I've yet to have any of them approved. I guess until I get the right folks on the inside I will sit here and wave to myself. If I ever do get a legitimate test going - and more importantly if I can figure out how to tie Wave into my tracking and billing system - I will make sure and post a full report.

As we have discussed in our earlier posts on the Business of Web Development inexperienced customers (ones who have never done an IT project) are often surprised at the cost associated with a project. This is partially the result of the reputation that the web has for being cheap. Customers look at services like godaddy.com for example, and they see that they can register and host a site for the cost of skipping a couple of frappuccinos a month. While this is true, it is really not the same as professional design and development services and high performing, scalable, redundant, mission critical hosting services.

In fact, if I could digress to hosting for a moment, customers often fail to see the cost benefit of a more complete "managed" hosting setup. They spend thousands on development and then try to save a few hundred dollars a year on hosting. Having settled on hosting "on the cheap" they often have to pay someone a high hourly rate to do things like troubleshoot an underperforming server or handle DNS settings or figure out their mail services for them, or (worst of all) alter their code to conform to a changing server environment - like when a host recently disabled createobject() on a server causing an application to fail for someone who is now our customer. Any savings they might have gained is eaten up in support costs and they are actually losing money on the deal. In the words of Jesus they "strain out a gnat and swallow a camel" (email me if you don't know exactly what that means - I'll enlighten you).

Of course when it comes to development costs there are other things that mystify customers. As we have discussed before, customers often only account for the visual "up-front" items of a web application. They see forms, lists, charts and displays when the reality is that the bulk of the work on many complicated projects goes into coding, revisions, Q/A and Project Management. Here are a few fallacies that range from the hair-brained to flights of fancy:

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In our first post on this topic, Red Lobster Eyes With a Happy Meal Wallet, we began the discussion of the difficulty involved in estimating projects for startup companies. We took the time to chat about the nature of the bright people with big ideas who choose to try something new on the Internet. Our main point was that Big Idea people often underestimate the time and money it takes to complete a project. Today we will talk about one of the principle pitfalls that arise in reaction to lack of resources.

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If you have read my post, Great Expectations, you know that I spend a good percentage of my time helping entrepreneurs outline requirements for brilliant new ideas as well as helping them figure out the cost. I am the "chief estimator" at my growing company. Creating an accurate Estimate is an extremely important part of running a company like CF Webtools - a large project can affect our profitability (or lack thereof) for the entire year. My goal in estimating is to charge enough to pay for the development - salaries, expenses and infrastructure - and of course to make a profit. A second, equally important goal, is to give the project its best chance for success for the customer.

In the next 2 posts we will take a look at the dynamics of this task and in particular the importance of managing the relationship between the customer and the developer or development company. But let's start with the role of the development company - or in my case, my role in particular.

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