The Anatomy of an Upgrade

Because we focus on building long term relationships with our clients, a large part of my job as a project manager involves managing site upgrades and maintenance work for existing clients. Here's an overview of how we handle that process at Newfangled.

Request for Work and (re)Quoting

This process typically starts with us getting an email or phone call from a client with a request for work to their site. Sometimes, they already know exactly what they need. Sometimes they just have a general idea of the desired outcome and aren't quite sure how to get there. Whatever the scenario, a large part of our job as project managers is to offer strategic insight to our clients, whether that means advising against a particular upgrade whose cost far outweighs its potential value, or working with the client to determine possible solutions to meet their needs. Once we have a defined scope for the upgrade, we take the request and enter it into our resourcing system, where it's reviewed by a developer and our resourcing team. Our resourcing team will develop a quote for the work, taking into account all internal time that will be spent from start to finish. We then get back in touch with the client, typically over email to deliver the quote. An email gives us all something tangible to reference and allows us to put our quote in the closest thing to writing as possible. After all, a quote is a promise.

Sometimes a client will want to reconfigure a work request if the initial quote is more than they can afford. We do this quite often, but it can get tricky if we find ourselves requoting over and over again in order to get to an (often undisclosed) lower price. Because we spend so much time working with the client to figure out the final work plan, the price won't keep going down, as y‪ou get to a point of diminishing returns. To keep this kind of thing to a minimum, we like to try to get all the information, including non-negotiables like essential functionality and budget, up front.‬

Client Approval and Scheduling the Work

Some of our clients require purchase orders for all billable work, but we don't require anything fancy on our end for quote approvals—a simple email back does the trick. (My personal favorite client approval email simply read "Make it so!") Often, our clients will ask for a potential schedule should they approve the work. It's important to note that while we do our best to accommodate our clients own internal schedules, we are not able to actually hold time in our development schedule for quoted work. Our production schedule is constantly changing; on any given day new work can get approved or current projects can get delayed for any number of reasons. Because approvals for quotes can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 weeks (that may sound like an exaggeration, but you'd be surprised), it's impossible for us to foresee what our production schedule may look like when the quote is approved. Although we may give a proposed schedule with a quote upon request, officially scheduling all upgrades and maintenance upon approval keeps our production schedule feasible and ensures we're able to deliver on our promises.

Completing the Work on the Staging Site

The next step is for the developer to complete the work on the staging site. The staging site lives on our local development server and is the same site that was used by the client pre-launch for content entry (yourwebsite.newfangled.com). Almost all maintenance work and upgrades are first completed on the staging site - this gives us the chance to work out any potential bugs before changes are made to the live site and provides the client one more chance to review the work on a fully functional site. A quick approval on the work means that we all—the client included—nailed it, and we can start planning to apply the changes to the live version of the site. In most cases, we are able to make some small tweaks and adjustments to the work before going live. However, if after interacting with the new functionality on the staging site the client realizes they want it to work differently than planned or make a significant addition that wasn't part of the original scope of the upgrade, we would have to provide an additional quote for the changes. We do our best during any quoting and planning phase to address all the what ifs, but it's difficult for anyone to really assess whether they conceived of something correctly until they use it.

Client Approval and Go Live

Once we have approval from the client, we can schedule to take the changes live and are typically able to do so within 1-3 days of approval. As with other go lives, we try not to take any upgrades live on Fridays since we will be unavailable over the weekend if a bug arises. It's important to note that only functionality is affected by go lives, not content. After the initial site go live, the content on the staging site will never again match the content on the live site, as all post go live content edits and entries get made to the live site. This means that if there is any new content entry associated with the upgrade, our clients will have to wait until the changes are live in order to enter content. If content is entered on the staging site, it will not be moved over to the live site with the new functionality.