Transcript:

Hello everyone. Today we’re talking about how to integrate BrainLeaf into your design and development process. Normally we see these set of steps from most agencies. First, people meet with a client, they detail those business goals usually in a sales process. Then, they bring in a project manager and/or sometimes the entire team. They start to design a wireframe, go into development, and then launch track and upsell. Keep in mind, I know that these are not your in depth steps, these are just the broad steps. Most companies have between a 16 and 45 step, more in depth steps for this process. However, the thing that I feel like is so often missing is this step right here, scoping the project. This is where BrainLeaf comes in.

Before going into designing and wireframing, having a scope of work that’s been signed off on. An in depth scope of work that’s been signed off on by the client can make a huge difference in the amount of work you end up doing, the amount of money you end up making, and your client’s happiness with the project. Let’s get into how this is done. Here we go, I’m on the BrainLeaf dashboard right now. When you first log in it looks like this. I just went ahead and expanded out all the different projects in this particular place.

We’re going to take a look first at this project, this rental company project. This is a company that rents out wedding equipment, machines, things like that. This could be anything from chairs to tables in some cases or bulldozers in other cases. They wanted a fairly large system that had a wish list system, a quote building system, even a little bit of machine learning in there. We needed to put together kind of a round number estimate for them, just something so that we knew we were talking apples to apples when we were talking to them.

What we do is we go through and we put together this features only set-up. Oops, actually I’ve already got it open right here. When we came in these were the general features that we pulled in while we were talking to this client. This is just general notes, SEO and analytics training, we’ve just got a few hours on that, a design process, we got 30 hours. You can see throughout here we just got kind of the overall everything we were putting into the system and ideas on how long this was going to take. You know, eight hours for this auto-complete search bar, that’s like a custom auto-complete system, project management and listing system, we just had eight hours on that. We had a system we were going to integrate for that. Then, front end coding, about 20 hours there.

It ended up giving us, at a round number quote, about $23,000. Then we were able to come back to the client fairly quickly. I think this took us about, I don’t know, two hours to write up and kind of plan out and discuss with the developers. We could … We provided back to them $23,000, give or take about 20%. This let everybody know exactly, that we were talking apples to apples. They weren’t expecting $5,000 and we weren’t expecting $100,000, this was just kind of, put everybody on the same page.

From there, we ended up not getting this particular contract but our next step would have been to go build a page-by-page, section-by-section scope for the entire system. That part is part of the paid system, I think it’s actually up in this section right here. We had … Our project management for this we kind of threw into this area. We also had about eight hours to go through and write up the entire system for them. By the way, this eight hour, it’s only eight hours because we already have so much of this stuff already done in other projects that we need to pull out and drop in that have already been benchmarked within those projects.

What would a page-by-page system look like, or page-by-page scope look like? In that case, I’m just going to pull up this project, the Medispa. This is a Medical Spa Project. We ended up not building for the client as well. It’s just a simple WordPress site. Ended up coming up to about 48 hours, about $5,000 of work, $6,000 of work. In this case, we have a template that we used where we just came into our starter templates. We had a boilerplate, small business site, dragged and dropped this in, and it filled out most of this for us. I’m going to get to that more in just a second because I’ve already got this one all done.

That starter template fills out our project-wide task, planning and architecture, design. In this case, by the way, the design is a theme based design so there’s no design process on this. There is individual page-by-page coding but not an overall design process. Then we’ve got our hosting setup, code rope setup, launch, et cetera. Then, within there we’ve got things like our CMS and all the different plugins we’ve got on that CMS or that we’re going to put in for this particular project. Then, mobile responsiveness, little changes there, et cetera, et cetera. Then, we get into what goes into the rest of the project.

Let me scroll down a little bit. We got our home page, we got our goals, what goes into the promo, give away boxes, service boxes, testimonials, et cetera, et cetera. You can see we’ve broken this down into, everything down to a quarter of an hour in coding and .15 hours in collaboration. Then, we could just deliver this as a … By the way, this only took … I think with everything put together it took me about 15 minutes to put this together. Once we have all this done which, by the way, was just mostly drag and drop into the system, then we can deliver this to the client. Either by just coming in here and clicking print, selecting as a PDF and exporting it and it prints up. Let me go ahead and pull that up. It goes ahead and prints up the system, prints that up as a PDF or we can send it out for approval.

The approval process system enables us just to choose, in this case add a new client so put in who they are, choose which contract we’re going to send to them, and then send them this whole entire system. They have a view where they can approve and decline the entire system. From there, that’s pretty much it. That covers how we go through and scope that process. Hold on one second, I’m going to pull up the PDF as well. Alright, so here is the Medispa PDF that got printed out. You can see hours, cost, overall description. Then, here we’ve got a list of everything that went into this project. I would like to point out that in the printout and in the client approval system you can remove these hours. You can set these are prices. You can show and not show all sorts of different things within this area.

Anyway, we go through and we quote this whole thing out, we put it all together for them. It keeps everyone together on what’s being built, what’s not being built, what goes into the system, what doesn’t go into the system, et cetera. It just makes it a lot smoother going through the project with the client. Anyway, after we get done with this section then we get started on doing either wireframes or design work or getting a theme, whatever step that may be next in the process. We never move forward until we have this step completed because there’s no way then without this to know exactly what we’re building, what we’re not building, and to keep everything together with the client.

I hope this was helpful for you. If you have any questions, please shoot us an email. Thanks for watching.