Are you busy?

I went along to "i-design: design for life" yesterday. In one Q&A session somebody mentioned that it was hard for people who were involved in new media to come to an event like i-design. They work for small companies. They're too busy with deadlines to spend a whole day, or even half a day, thinking deep thoughts. The comment clearly came from painful experience "We spend all our time pitching, we don't get paid for it."

One thing that Agile methods do is encourage teams to keep track of what a project really costs. This doesn't have to involve detailed filling in of time sheets, but it should definitely include all those late nights until three in the morning. Those late nights don't come for free. Everybody has a limited number that they can give you before they start sending out their CV or getting signed off work with stress.

Knowing how long a job actually took is useful in all sorts of ways. Research has shown that experts are much better than novices at knowing their own abilities. Keeping track of what you said you would do and what you actually did starts to provide you with this self-knowledge.

Agile methods are noted for reducing the number of defects the work that is produced. Many things might explain this, but perhaps the most important is that they encourage a way of working in which well-rested people work on projects during normal working hours. When you start to use these figures to inform the prices that you quote for future work, your clients will notice the difference.