Success story from reader Justin Miller

I have good news about success with a client! I converted the project for the client I mentioned to you on the phone into a priced-by-value project! I took your suggestions and had the client really show me what problem I would be solving for them, why I am needed at all, and how important it would be for them to get this project done.

By doing this process for the first time in any project I’ve worked on, I found that there were a lot of aspects to the project that allowed for less unnecessary work to be done to create the same product that was originally discussed with the client. At first, we were going to have several databases created with tables that represent different stages of data import for manipulation/normalization, just to replace a bad system that works the same way.

Going through the process of having the client justify what he needed done, it got me thinking along the same lines of, “What do I actually need done to satisfy the client’s needs?”. It became obvious immediately that we didn’t need databases involved at all for transient data normalization.

I don’t know if that would have been as obvious to me if I hadn’t applied the principles I learned from your blogs and which were solidified during our conversation. I could easily have been halfway through building the project before realized I wasted time on trying to mirror a bad architecture, that contained arbitrary extra work and points of potential failure.