What is the Biggest Timing Holdup in Development Projects?

Tony: Large part of any project — timing, schedule, when it’s going to launch, when it’s going to finish being developed. What is the biggest timing hold up in development projects?

Jake: That’s a great question. It goes back to the problem that we’re trying to solve (check out our video interview on “The Crux of Solving Development Challenges (Spoiler Alert: It’s Humans)”. And it’s like I said before, we’re solving the human problem and we’re just doing that through technology. So naturally, the things that slow us down the most are humans. And it’s the communication back and forth, it’s the, “Oh, I need this resource, I need this question answered.” And all of a sudden, if you the client are taking a day or week, well now that just pushed back timelines a day or a week, assuming that that question and the answer that you give doesn’t affect other pieces. And so there’s — and that’s the risk of doing projects, and that’s a risk that we take on. When we’re trying to work with somebody, we trust that we’ve built a partnership and one that is a two-way street. It’s not something that you say, “Hey, go do this…” and LLT comes and we just do that and then give it to you. You ask us to do something, we start working on it. But we’re getting you and keeping you in the loop as you’re going. And it’s addressing the fact that the biggest holdup from getting your project from start to finish, is actually you. We’re here, and the concept of user stories is to provide you an idea of, “Hey, this is how much time that we have.” 

So at the end of the day, you do have like a baseline that you know how long your project is going to take. We try to stick somewhere between eight to 12 weeks. Twelve weeks is really the maximum, because anything more than that — like, it’s hard to understand what needs to be built and why it needs to be built. You haven’t had enough exposure to solve your problem and you might be investing more money than you need to and more cost than you need to. And so, it also boils down to when all of a sudden partway through the project when something inevitably changes — if you, the client, decided that, “Hey, we need to completely rework the foundation of this or the electrical,” Well now, that’s something that delays that. So for us, if you were like, “Hey, here’s this project, and LLT, just build it and give it to me,” we’re going to get it done really, really fast. But it’s that back and forth and the partnership that makes it a more prolonged process, but it also makes it a more valuable process.