Predictions
This morning while getting ready, I was watching the local news. They had on a meteorologist who was predicting what spring will be like this year. I’m generally a positive person who likes to pass on happy news, so I won’t depress you with the prediction. It wasn’t a pleasant one.
He also predicted the weather going into Spring and said he believes we will get two more large snowstorms, one more yet in February. There is only a week left in the month. I hope to everything sacred that his prediction is way, way off. I couldn’t handle it at this point. It’ll be about mid June before I fully thaw out.
But I’m not going to let it get me down. Predictions are just guesses into the future. No one knows what it really holds until you’re actually there experiencing it, and think about how much the weather changes on the inside of a week. It’s liable to do about 50,000 jumps and turns within a pocket of 1-3 months.
That’s why at DDA we try to make sure our”predictions” are grounded more in fact than guesswork. For each new project, we provide an estimated breakdown of the time we think it will take to complete. This is based on information provided by the client, any research that may be needed, and assumptions made internally. All time studies are done by someone within the technical/creative department that’s doing the work, and projects that involve multiple mediums have multiple time studies, like one from programming, video production, website design and development, and print production. So I guess you call this, calling on the experts.
Similar to forecasts, you cannot account for every unknown. There are mitigating factors time to time, that for one reason or another, lead to changes in the original proposal. But unlike the weather predictors, we have a lot more control over the end product and do everything we can to work as effectively and efficiently as possible. We’re also pretty upfront from the start and do everything we can to be as accurate in our estimates as possible.
So if you equate us to a weather forecast, if we predict three feet of snow to hit on Tuesday, you can be sure it will. Of course, we would certainly never predict that. It would be more like we predict an animation, with voiceover narration, in an interactive game format to hit some time in mid March.
Entry by: toni