Application Development Tips

• Be proactive. Don't wait for projects to come to you. Propose innovative applications that can increase the organization's efficiency and visibility and save money in the process. You'll gain respect both internally and externally.

• Get buy-in from the business office. If you feel strongly that a particular project is important, enlist someone on the business side to help champion your cause. You might encounter less resistance in getting corporate buy-in (and budget).

• Be versatile and flexible. A single application based on a single architecture may not do the trick in every situation. Be open-minded enough to evaluate all the options before making your recommendation. If Microsoft's deep integration would shave 100 hours off a certain project, for instance, take that into account. If going with an open-source solution would save a significant amount in licensing fees, factor that into the equation.

• Estimate high, but not too high, and don't blow your deadlines. Sure, most programming projects are more time-consuming than they appear at first glance, but if you inflate your time estimates unreasonably, you'll just foster the impression that developers can't be trusted. Cushion your estimates by 10 percent to 15 percent max, to cover yourself without looking foolish or lazy. Then do whatever it takes to meet the dates you set.

• Encourage your customers to set priorities. Every department head believes his or her project is critical, but you can only put your team to work on so many applications at a time. Hold a regular management meeting to get a feel for the significance and immediacy of each project, and gently press the attendees to agree on a realistic schedule.• Know your developers' strengths and weaknesses, and assign the right person to each project. If your top integration developer is tied up with a long-term project, know who on your staff has some expertise in that area to handle other projects that crop up. And if a particular client tends to be demanding and overbearing, don't put your most short-tempered uber-geek on the job.

• Listen to your users. You may be more technically astute than your users, but they're the ones who'll be working day in and day out with the programs you write. Survey them informally and address their needs early in the design process--their up-front input can save you countless hours in changes late in the game.

• Stay in contact with your customers. Keep your clients apprised of your progress throughout each project, through periodic status reports or casual conversations, and don't wait too long to deliver bad news. If some unavoidable delay occurs, for example, tell the customer sooner rather than later, so he or she can adjust the rollout schedule accordingly, and be prepared to provide a reasonable explanation for the delay.

• Do your own PR. Don't brag, but don't be shy about tooting your own horn, either. Diplomatically let the IT director, the CIO and others up the food chain know the part you and your team played in every successful project. Talk with people in other departments to get some buzz going about upcoming app dev projects, and get them thinking about how they can best use your services. And get creative--assign someone on staff to submit entries to the company's newsletter, for instance, to keep the app dev name in front of internal customers, or start a newsletter of your own.

--Don MacVittie, [email protected]Post a comment or question on this story.