Back in early 2016, after finishing my master program in Computing and Innovation at The University of Adelaide, I encouraged myself to wade deep into freelancing world. My first client was a small local company run by a successful young guy. What I did was to continue unfinished work using technology a bit unfamiliar to me. I managed to learn for few weeks, and I was good to go. At first, We don’t have any written contract or whatsoever it was, since I thought that was ok to us. Days, weeks and months passed by, my financial situation became a serious matter. I thought, by taking another project I still can deal with them. In fact, that was not so easy for me to manage life balance between spending time with family and staring my old creepy laptop.
To make matters worse, I also joined in several co-founder of startup, as side job, I repeat once again, as a side job, without any planning where we were going to head. The only thing in our mind was to create a transportation business just like uber, grab or gojek without thinking how we could finance it, started from writing code from scratch because I was the only guy who know programming. I gave up, since I really did not have much time to tackle too many project. We ended up buying source code from codecanyon to speed up the process. Again, it seemed far from expectation, the code was incompatible with what we want. Enough is enough, I told them I am out. That was too hard for me. Later on, I focused on development from small project to other small project to be able to feed my family.
The later project was medium size and the requirement was so obscure and seemed that the users did not really know what they want. It is an ideal situation for using an adaptive process where to start with general direction based on whatever the assumption and knowledge and continue to refine the direction of the project based on observations throughout the duration of the project.
This adaptive process is best-suited for projects where mostly clients have a very little clue about what they want. Isn’t that ridiculous to try to develop a detailed plan for the effort upfront because there is so much uncertainty. What I learned from the journey was, it is crucial to make clear the objective of the project, amount of spending budget before proceeding and of course the payment scheme.