With the festive season around the corner, now is often the time to come up for air, looking back at all that the year has brought us. We are blessed to have seen the year through with as much consistency and grit as could be expected. We went from brick and mortar to virtual and back, all the while enduring a tumultuous economy, capped off with occasional “load-shedding”.

In reflection, there are a few stand out lessons to take to the bank. For one our approach to projects, the work we produce as well as attracting new opportunities has been scrutinized and put to the test 10-fold this year.

REFLECTING ON HARD LESSONS LEARNT

The biggest lessons often lay right in front of us as we navigated a handful of tough briefs this year. These projects stretched and grew us, however also challenged our resolve immensely. We had some unique situations where “school-fees” didn’t go unnoticed and we found ourselves rectifying this as the year progressed.

Given the trying economy, many jobs were tag teamed with reliable resources, however in some cases customers attempted to take their pound of flesh. These projects in hindsight were a result of us not getting a clear picture of the job requirements from the onset, client changing direction, and complications with third party integrations.

One job that comes to mind, we quoted out based off a very specific brief, only to find out in the first progress meeting there were more intricate requirements waiting for us. It not only added to the complexity having two new systems we had to integrate with, it also got messy trying to bill for the additional time spent navigating these systems. As a result, we had far exceeded the hours billed, and contracted in external developers at additional cost to us. The lesson and better approach would have been for us to take on the additional request as time and material and charge for actual time spent, to ensure we cover our costs.

Our Year In Review
TRIMMING TO MEET OUR CLIENTS NEEDS

With the continued uncertainty of the South African economy, several clients have been sensitive to price, coupled with this, even jobs that did land, occasionally got jammed in the pipeline due to cashflow uncertainty. People and companies are under pressure financially, however the lesson for us in this was to become more agile, moving with the market as fluidly as possible. We would explore ways to meet our client’s requirements at the budget they had available. In addition to this we had to become way more transparent, providing more detailed quotes to reduce the room for error or miscommunication. As a result, instead of an empty job board, we trimmed it to meet our needs as well as our clients. Working together to realise successful projects in a hard-fitting, tumultuous time.

We wish all our valued customers a cracker 2019 and all the best for their festive season. Here’s to a prosperous 2019, filled with life, love and laughter.