Week 425

We made use of our recent upgrade to The Office Group (TOG) co-working membership to spend 4 days working at TOG in Bloomsbury and 1 day at home. I really enjoyed working at home yesterday. Partly because of the break from the commute but also because it was such a beautiful day to be on the river. Not quite sit-outside weather but definitely sitting-inside-next-to-the-open-door weather :-)

We’ve divided our time this week between GDS and GFR with a bias toward GDS.

GFR

Contracts

James spent most of Monday reviewing a contract we’ve recently received. We revisited the idea of paying someone to review contracts for us but have decided against it for now. We’re not sure how much value we’d get out of such a service without first explaining in detail how we want to work: a process that would probably take as long as it takes for us to review the contract.

Billing

We’ve had some interesting and productive discussions about billing for client work. Chris highlighted that the process we’d fallen into (billing for time) is slightly at odds with what we say on our website:

You pay a fixed cost per iteration. Since we deliver working software of value to your business with each iteration, we give you the flexibility to disengage at any point. We’re confident that the quality of our work and the rate at which we deliver it will have you coming back for more.

We’ve agreed to try a slightly different approach and to review it each week to see whether it’s still working. I’m hoping we’ll write about this in more detail soon.

Show & Tell 30

We hosted our 30th Show & Tell at Forge & Co on Wednesday. At one stage we thought it was just going to be the three of us so we were very happy to be joined by Ben, Pablo and Rob D.

Retrospective

Chris, James and I had a retrospective of the week over lunch today.

We focussed on the things that went well and those that didn’t go so well. One of the things we identified as not going so well was one of the first discussions we had about billing. We started this particular discussion at the end of a tiring day and we all found it a bit tough/frustrating. The upside is that we continued the discussion with fresh minds the following day and were able to come to an agreement.

I found the retrospective really useful and hope that we keep it up from now on.

GDS

We’ve made some good progress toward our goal of simplifying the manuals-publisher app. This has mostly consisted of removing unused code and renaming working code so that it mirrors the domain and user interface language.

I enjoyed spending a good couple of days pairing with Chris. I found it productive and think/hope it’s helped Chris get up to speed on the app.

Until next time.

– Chris