July 1, 2003
Custom projects rarely go exactly as planned. Specifications change, equipment does not perform as advertised, exception / error / safety handling turns into a nightmare, someone totally forgot about this and that, the list goes on and on.
Our experience has been that every time you try to save a dollar -- it winds up costing you ten.
As you gain experience, these problems become less and less over the years. But they still come up on almost every project. Especially when you are doing custom projects.
At High Tech Services, we over design things and use large safety margins so that when the unexpected happens (as it usually does) -- it is no big deal. Safety margins of 25% are common -- 50% is even better. These safety margins are common for all items:
We know for a fact that there will be problems that will come up during any project and we will have to deal with them. When we tell customers this -- they get real worried and say "if you know what the problems will be -- why don't you avoid them".
If we knew what the problems were ahead of time -- then we could avoid them. The problem is that each project is custom and therefore presents new and unknown problems. But we solve them, every time.
Although you can avoid a lot of problems, and we avoid more than most of our competitors -- the reality is that you can't avoid all of them. The easiest way to avoid problems are:
Doing everything right will not cover-up huge mistakes. There is no excuse for poor design from the start. But for plugging a few holes -- these practices will smooth over many problems.
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