Going over quotes, talking about different developers, pros and cons, and current projects. We keep coming back to breaking things into smaller pieces. It does take more management, but we tend to get a better result. As a side note, we have had some epic fails on our part. Some of that is part of learning as well.

We had some good discussion on just in time (J.I.T.) project management. We are very good at that. We also talked about how agendas and plans can help keep things on track. We talked about some potential meetings with clients and helping with the communication needs. Small meetings with our developers, return and report, accountability for what they are working on. Good stuff.

Planning and progress meetings and presentations. Get our guys and gals used to presenting and showing what they are working on. It will help all parties involved. Think of how we could eventually get into doing pitches - bang, bang, here you go! That would be awesome.

We would like to get ahead of things vs always playing tag and catchup. We tend to get pulled in every possible direction, that makes it hard sometimes. The more we look into it, the deeper the management stack needs to be. We run pretty thin right now. We also talked about other stacks and levels. One of the big things is setting and reaching expectations. This includes tracking and billing for our time. This could be development, consulting, managing, communications, project management, design, etc. The whole stack.

Steve was talking about depth (the space or Z axis - think 3D levels) and how crazy things get with compliance issues, complexity of what is being done and tracked, and other needed factors. Easy and pretty doesn't always solve things. Sometimes you need that depth, layering, and/or spatial elements. As a reminder, according to us, the 3D levels are: X axis = time (horizontal or moving over time), Y axis = money and resources (vertical or going up and down), and the Z axis = space, depth, layering, and stacking. Here is a small help file that talks about some of those pieces.

After that, we started talking about possible tick list items that one of our clients would like to have and/or fund. We will be building a bigger tick list of sorts to share with them. Ideally, we would like to know what their goals, priorities, and expectations would be. We would love to do the work, it would really help us out if we could cover and get paid for our efforts. We've put a lot into this project. We would love some help.

At the end of the meeting, John had some questions for us on how to track credit card stuff and how to track a virtual expense account using adilas. Good little training session and we showed him what we do and what pieces are automated through the usage of the adilas system. Lots of talk about accounting, expense/receipts, expense types, on account payments, accounts payable, splits, etc.