Good Employees, Poor management - Anonymous employee App Partner Employee Review

We understand that our deadlines can sometimes be tight, some of that is the nature of our industry and sometimes its because we under-estimate project duration. To correct that we've incorporated more detailed time tracking so we can do post-mortems on projects and see how they deviated from our initial estimates. Using that information we've been able to improve our projections and now will occasionally come in under estimates on projects. We've also rolled out 'time & materials' and 'dedicated team' style contracts for projects with changing requirements so we can better handle projects that inherently will have frequent client change requests. For fixed-contracts we've beefed up the level of detail in our proposals and streamlined the change request process. We've also finally achieved a long-term goal of booking projects sufficiently far in advance to allow the design phase to always be 100% complete prior to development beginning, no exceptions. There's still work to be done because occasionally we do go over estimates on fixed contracts. However when that happens we'll now transition the project to our Head of Development under the "closer model" so he'll personally make the final modifications before closing the project. Although not ideal it does allow us to eliminate the "have to have this project finished by Friday" situation. These changes have really helped improve the development team scheduling and deadlines situations. We're still working on other ways to improve our process and estimates since there's obviously always room for improvement. In terms of the other feedback this employee brought up we have now institutionalized 1-5% performance based raises every 6 months and also always provide two weeks notice when that becomes necessary. However our goal is to use the quarterly performance reviews to keep employees and management on the same page so if giving two weeks notice becomes necessary it wouldn't be a surprise for either party.