The Wildest Project Mistakes done by Clients

Introduction

This blog post is a compilation of the most ridiculous yet very common mistakes that I keep on seeing on projects. What you are about to read might hurt your feelings but, it will save you money.

Do you even version source control, bro?

Where and how do you keep and manage your project files? Please, don’t tell me that you are using Cloud Storage options such as Google Drive, Dropbox and such. Many clients literally do not care about this. I understand, you just want to be the visionary leader and focus on the creative and interesting tasks. You don’t want to deal with what seems to you like ridiculous, tiny, unimportant tasks. Yet, they are intrinsic to your project’s survival. So, you either have to do it yourself or have someone who you can trust with your life to do that instead of you.

I’ve seen clients losing many files, months of projects and sometimes even entire projects. The reasons? Their developers blackmailing them. Incompetent handling. Non-existent file & folder structure. Team and project mismanagement.

If your project is using

Where’s your Technical Director?!

Not keeping source files

Get a second opinion

The best advice I can give to any software project owner is - get a second opinion. This is a core principle of being a critical thinking person. One developer will tell you it can’t be done or it’s too expensive, the other will tell you it’s cheap and doable. Have you ever heard of those stories where people get diagnosed for something by one doctor, but they don’t trust it. What they do then? They get a second opinion! You should do the same in software development! Whether it’s a video game project, metaverse, digital twin, mobile app, website, product configurator… doesn’t matter.

Always have a backup developer

I don’t have exact statistics, but the majority of the projects I worked on in my career were started by other developers. Clients tend to find me and call me when it’s too late or about to be too late to fix stuff on their projects.

How can this all be prevented?

Call me for consulting. I will