Monday, June 16, 2008

project management 101

Estimating: What and How to Charge

Estimating projects is a developed skill - it will mostly depend on your ability to properly estimate scope (how big is the project really?) and client management (how much time will it take to educate and control the client?).

When to invoice?

Invoicing expectations should be established prior to the start of work. A normal payment schedule is 30% upon approval of the proposal or Project Plan, 30% upon approval of the visual look and feel, and the remainder upon delivery of the final site. Be clear that any additional charges will be clearly identified and approved at any point in the development process where they apply and that those charges will be added to the final invoice.

source: http://www.web-redesign.com resource: http://www.pmi.org

Friday, June 13, 2008

Stuck in time

The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.” --the impact of clocks on human behaviour

In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

source: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

From the article- Is Google making us dumber?

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”