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Company Background

I work in a recent startup company and basically we just have 3 persons (1 sales cum developer, 1 developer and 1 designer) at this moment. 3 of us are junior and basically have 2 - 3 years experiences.

Most of our project are website development, small enhancement on existing open source ecommerce framework, etc.

We are multitasking since we have few projects coming in at the some time. We didn't do any documentations, nor sign agreement form with client.

Basically we communicate with client through email, and they let us know their needs, we estimate the time and send the quoatation to the client.

However with more and more project coming in and facing with some difficult customers who keep changing their requirement. I found that if we didn't change our process and we will end up either demotivate or fail the project.

Questions:

  1. What is the recommended forms that we need to prepare and sign with client or we need to document for future references? A form name will be good enough, I will google for the sample template.

The reason I want to have the official form is because:

  1. It can protect us if client keep on changing their requirement
  2. As a documentation so we can refer back if we have similar project in future
  3. It makes our team look more professional and make clients feel better.

However I want to avoid in case too many form and make customer feel frustrated.

Below is the scenario that I can imagine from our previous project.

1) When sales meet with client, he show client on our existing portfolio and discuss about the client problems. Then we analyse the problems and estimate the timeline and propose to client how we can develop a website/software that is able to help the client business. If client agree and appoint us. We will send quotation to him and expect a purchase order from the client.

At this stage, what is the official form should we document or sign? Project scope management? Feasibility study? Risk Analysis? Gantt Chart? Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)?

2) After receive client's PO, designer will start to design mockup and send it to sales. Sales will meet customer for UAT and do the presentation. Customer feedback the neccessary changes and might add some features which is not included in the intial agreement.

How should we document the changes and the additional feature that we can bill the client later? Change Request Form?

Also since we have others project coming in, the client A's additional request might affect client B project milestone. How can we explain to customer A said that the changes that he requested will only can be added on 2 months later, etc.

3) Project completed, we need to sign client acceptance form and maintenance agreement? any others?

In that case, why do we need to have milestone report, progress report and requirement matrix?

Thanks.

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Hi cww. Your question is way too broad and is likely to be closed as it looks like a "How to manage projects?" kind of question. Maybe you could try to split it into several smaller questions dealing with each one of your problems. In any case you will not find answers to questions like "I would like to know what is the correct project management procedures/workflow?" since answers would be highly subjective and solicit discussion. Please have a look at the FAQ to learn about the kind of question you can/cannot ask on this site. Hope this helps. – Matthias Jouan Dec 9 '12 at 20:32
Hi cww, welcome back! I agree with Matthias. This would be much better split up into multiple separate questions as it would give people an opportunity to provide concrete answers based on their separate area of expertise. We're closing this post for now, just to give you some time to use it as a reference for splitting up the posts. You can also edit this one down to focus on one area and flag for reopening. Hope this helps! Let us know if you have any questions or advice on how to split this up. We're happy to help! :) – jmort253♦ Dec 9 '12 at 23:51

closed as not a real question by CodeGnome, Matthias Jouan, jmort253♦ Dec 9 '12 at 23:51

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.