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Treefrog Handbook

Mistakes (BETA)

Be accountable for problems and errors.

You may believe someone “down the chain” might be better suited to pick up problems or errors, but ultimately, if the client can pick out the error, it is your mistake for not catching it first. The client is paying you for your professionalism and talent. It is your responsibility to step up to this level of accountability.

The new Mistake system is a mechanism where we are going to add two new projects for the company to start tracking everyone’s mistakes. This is not about turning Treefrog into a “blame culture”, but rather, turning Treefrog into an “accountability culture”. Before Treefrog can demand accountability, we need do find out where the holes are. Our two projects will be:

  1. My Mistake - For fixing your mistakes.
  2. Treefrog Mistake - For fixing someone else’s mistakes.*

*If you make a mistake, it is your responsibility to fix it. However, sometimes you may need someone else to fix the problem for you. This bucket will be highly monitored and may go away if abused.

These two buckets will be projects. Once the project you are working on has been “signed off”, you should no longer bill time against the original project. You will need to drop all future production time into “My Mistakes”.

For obvious reasons, we will look at your “Mistake Bucket” regularly with you and assess what the heck went wrong. Once we have some data, we may reward those people with the fewest mistakes and may “open discussions” with those who have chronic issues.

Some suggestions:

  1. Get someone in your own pod to check your work before sending it to another pod or a client.
  2. Do not sign off until it is “Done, Done”, not just “Probably Done”.
  3. Triple-check all work.

Let us see where this new system leads us.

What Qualifies as a “My Mistake”

Firstly, if it causes you an iota of professional embarrassment, it is probably a mistake. Some other examples:

  1. Big Visual Issues - If the client can find it in 30 seconds, not acceptable.
  2. Bugs - If there is a bug in your code where something does not work the way it was intended and you send it to the client, this is a blatant mistake. The client should not pay for a mistake.
  3. Omissions - A missing piece of critical functionality, no matter how you spin it, is a mistake. If you do not catch it and fix it, it is your mistake. A missing section in a design is also your mistake. A missing article or missing content - you get the picture. You are a professional. You are a Frog. You should be able to look at the project and take ownership of what it should be.
  4. Spelling Mistakes - Everyone in this company can spell. If you are having a bad day, have a second set of eyes look at it.
  5. Fixing your Time in Frogweb - If you have not added or cleaned up your time in Frogweb on the fly, you cannot use admin time to go and fix your omission. You should be tracking time on the fly.
  6. Adding Descriptions in Frogweb - Going back and adding descriptions to what you have been doing in Frogweb is a mistake. You should have described the work up front or when you hit “stop”. Lack of descriptions means we are unable to bill for the work or SR&ED it later.

What DOES NOT Qualify as a “My Mistake”

  1. Client hates your design. Unfortunate, but not a mistake.
  2. It does not work on a browser that was not specified. This is a Champion mistake for not setting the standards properly.
  3. The client changed his or her mind. That never happens. Whaddyah mean?

What Qualifies as a “Treefrog Mistake”

A “Treefrog mistake” is an obvious mistake that was made by another Frog and requires that you clean up his or her mess.