Beginner's Guide

A few elementary and universal things in conducting professional business went wrong:
•
You didn't separate your different talents in distinctive roles. Symbolize them by different colored
caps. So from now on: define roles.
•
You didn't put on the right caps while answering the questions. That made you vulnerable: the
customer can take your answer from any point of view. Play your role!
HOW DO YOU DEFINE ROLES?
You don't have to. Definitions are readily available, just choose a set of roles that match your business
and communicate them. Put them in writing and make your customer acquainted with the various roles
you play professionally. Examples: account manager, consultant, contract manager, project manager,
designer, developer, tester, content-builder, hoster.
A customer or its representative will only abuse you playing 10 roles at a time IF YOU ALLOW
THEM TO.
To be safe and sound. Use these roles explicitly at all important times and play them.
I am sorry, ms. customer, as your developer I could never answer your "should we
use Joomla" question. The reason is your organization has to choose a webCMS
and I can make the best of it. Of course I can connect you with mr.
colleague_of_mine, he is consultant at our company and specialized in selection-
processes. His fee is very reasonable compared to the coverage of corporate risks
he covers with his advice.
PHP for the backup cycle. As a contract manager I would have to say 'no' to you,
because a backup procedure is out of scope. As a project manager I'm afraid I
have to give you the same answer for a different reason: we are busy in this sprint
reaching the deadline, we haven't planned it and I don't have the backup routine
in the release plan as a listed functionality that I have to fulfill. As a developer I
would say: yes, doable. But the alarm bells go off in my office as a hoster: first the
characteristics of the restore should be clear before we could invent a suitable
back-up strategy. You see, there are many ways of looking at this simple question.
Multilingual support in time? You have to be more specific to avoid
disappointment in the near future. I could say Yes to you, because it's easy to
install a translation module. That's my development cap. But somebody has got to
do the translations as well. And that could be me in a different role, different cap:
translator/configurator. If you expect 'Multilingual support' to be localized
content, I would have to perform a task that I am not able to: I am not a native
speaker of the foreign language that you focus at and I'm not a citizen that lives
locally in that region. Whether or not I can perform the tasks in time that I am
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 256