Great article Nicolas! I loved that you mentioned that the most important aspect is not to underestimate the time that the development will take. The one thing I might add to that is that it also becomes crucial to make everyone in the team – tech and non-tech – understand the length of the development process!

I sat down and talked to a developer a couple of weeks ago and one of the things he mentioned is that it is difficult to communicate the complexity of a given solution to “non-technical” clients. Every solution involves robust processes that are hard to grasp. He wished everyone would understand how hard and time-consuming coding some of these real-life solutions (or software) can be.

On the one hand – as you mention – changing of the requirements, failure in communication / understanding of the client’s needs and the indecision on the project leaders had to be considered within the timeframe. But it is just as relevant to manage non-technical project leaders, and PM’s expectations!