Waterfall Web

Just stumbled across this courtesy of one of Sitepoint’s newsletters – a Basecamp clone called activeCollab is being developed.

Still in alpha, but at least it’s open source and downloadable. For many, that’s a far more attractive proposition than paying for Basecamp on a monthly basis.

And if it’s anything like Basecamp it’s really simple to use.

Might have to check this one out…

What are we going to call this NetOffice fork? Another fork has been called NetOffice Dwins, so I’m thinking NetOffice Waterfall might be the go.

Or maybe NetOffice Light?

Dunno. Anyone got any other ideas?

We’ve been struggling a bit of late with the sheer number of projects we have on at the moment – seems like I’m spending more time reviewing each project than doing anything else.

The other problem is that projects seem to be taking forever to get finished, as we’re trying to do a bit here, a bit there – spreading ourselves way too thin.

A new house, anyone?

My brother and sister-in-law are having a new house built at the moment, and it was something my brother-in-law said to me last week that got me thinking. He was commenting on how quickly the house is being built – the slab was only laid about 5 weeks ago and it’s not far from finished. What he didn’t mention was the 6 months they waited for the builder to actually start!

If you’ve ever built a house, you’ll know that there’s a lot of stuff you have to worry about before the builder can start. Tap fittings, door handles, carpet colour… there’s quite a list. And only after all these things have been arranged does the builder actually start. And once they do, they get stuck in and the house actually goes up very quickly.

So here’s my lesson:

I’m only going to work on a couple of websites at a time. That way we can devote more attention to each project, and actually get the job done much faster.

When new clients come on board, we can give the client a start date and a to-do list, and make sure they understand that everything must be checked off that list before we can start.

So the client might have to join a queue before their website gets started, but once we do actually start it should come together quite quickly, as we’ll have everything we need in front of us.

Anyone care to share their thoughts/experience?