Overseas collaboration routines when working freelance for NYC tech companies
Overlapping work hours
Norway is 6 Hours in front of New york Meaning when your day starts 09:00 ive already been working 6 hours and have 2 left. So basically meetings and quick communication should happen between 09:00 and 11:00 (NYC time) which is plenty and enables everyone to work without interruption for 6 hours. We all know we work best with out interruption.
Weekly Milestones
This can be Friday or Wednesday for example. We upload the latest application build with the scheduled and unscheduled updates we work on the entire week. It’s great to have something scheduled to show for every week so everyone know we are on track.
Daily updates and communication Every day between 09:00 - 11:00 NYC time we can have quick chats, small meetings about features or demos that we need to OK in order to move forward etc. The idea is not to micromanage everything but keep an option open to be able to swiftly incorporate or take out stuff. Basically collaborate efficiently. Since ive been working 6 hours when you come to work i will in most cases have updates to demo.
Commitment
We need to have a chat about the scope of work dev and design and who els will be apart of the project, but as we have discussed it will be a month long project and probably a few days for fine tuning and client / user feedback. I will only be focused on this project for the project duration. In terms of contract / guarantee of completion. I can only promise that we will deliver on schedule if everyone is on board with the scoop of work. I have basically 3 golden rules if a project will go on overtime
- Back to back overtime just hurts the project
- adding more people never helped a project
- If we cant get more time we scale down on feature
And projects do sometime go overtime due to unforeseen difficulties. And late devilry of third party deliverables. As a developer i can only do so much if a design is late. Although i always add 20% slack time on time estimates, sometimes this isnt even enough to save a schedule.
But fear not we start with a solid millstone plan , UML diagrams of how the app will behave. (UML is very nice to see unforeseen difficulties early on and also helps a lot with time estimating and code structure) So i will invest 2 days scoping out UML diagrams for my self and for you.
Then we make todo lists on basecamp as we go along.