Evaluating incoming software projects

In a digital agency, you receive a lot of inquiries with questions like “can you do it? for how much? how long will it take?” without mentioning of necessary project details and a budget.

But you have to answer quickly to win the client. There are two steps here: pre-evaluation and evaluation.

First, pre-evaluation. Let’s assume that you filtered not interesting inquiries and for the rest, you should provide answers for “can you do it, how much and how quick” during a day.

You can’t spend much time gathering requirements yet, but you definitely can have a 30–60 minutes call with a potential customer (it will be unusual and alarming if he won’t agree to talk with you). What should you do?

1. Prepare: read all attachments (if they exist), learn about similar projects.
2. Ask about project goal.
3. Ask about edge cases, question why he sees thing this way, what are the reasons.
4. Ask any questions you have left from reading initial attachments.
5. Tell the customer your vision of a project, listen to his response.
6. Try to find underlying potential problems with tech/design/business.
7. Agree on some vision you will estimate.
8. Discuss which major parts of website/app/service you should estimate. Talk about MVP if appropriate.

After you finished the call, try immediately write everything down. Then, if you can wait till tomorrow — just wait, continue this next morning. Things will settle down a bit, you will have a clearer view, and customer might send you some important info.

Second, write a response with your estimates (seen an example):

1. Write project description.
2. Write project goals.
3. Write why you like it.
4. Write about project features. Mention underlying potential problems.
5. Create a mind map with project structure.
6. If you have enough time, you can provide basic user stories.
7. Write how you think you will build it, what are the major milestones, what’s your release strategy.
8. Write about resources you will need to accomplish a task.
9. Write time/budget estimate, based on tasks and/or resources. Don’t oversimplify things, but don’t go pessimistic route either.

A density of this response depends on how much you like/need the project. You probably want to discuss it with your team (but don’t spend much of their time, prepare everything in easily digestible form, decompose everything).

Depending on your agency rules, after initial response you probably will go back and forth on it, iterating, gathering more info. It’s useful to ask customer provide as much user stories as he can, and put them together, adding everything he missed. Don’t forget to return to the project goals if it goes sideways.

Project a vision, feature decomposition with product structure and a full set of user stories, knowledge of resources you need, and few discussions with a customer will give you a pretty accurate estimate.

And the best thing you can make — provide your answer in person, don’t rely on reading skills of your customer. :-)

Example: evaluation of the project

Example: “canned” user stories and tasks