Over the past few months my team and I have been trying to come up with an effective and efficient way to manage our web development process.  After having many meetings of the minds we could never quite settle on one basic outline, since the web development process is very complex and not one project is ever the same. After having one of these meetings I was at home making a cake and realized that project management is just like following a recipe.  In every recipe you have your ingredients listed in order with the instructions of when to add them, how to mix them, how to bake, and last serve.  Even people who don’t cook know that in order to serve an attractive delicious meal you must follow the recipe to a T and not leave out any of the ingredients, or skip any of the steps because when you do you are just asking for a recipe that is filled with distaste and disaster. As a project manager as you are going through the ingredients the most important thing you should be doing is making sure that you are mixing, or controlling and monitoring every step of the recipe so that if there is to much or to little of an ingredient, or worse if it was left out of the recipe all together that problem can be identified and corrected in a timely cost effective manner. So after thinking about this theory I sat down and put together some ingredients for my team and myself to follow so we can put together and serve a delicious final project to our clients. Here is a basic recipe and the ingredients I came up with: •    Communication:  I put this #1 on the list because I believe that this is the key ingredient to making any project successful.  If you do not have the proper communication with your client and your team you might as well just throw the remaining ingredients in the trash because the project is sure to fail from the beginning.  You must make sure that you understand exactly what your client is wanting and expecting from you, this will not only help with the development process, but will save your company valuable time and money too. •    The triangle:  Scope, time, cost, this is the seasoning that makes up the triangle.  It is crucial to any project manager to know all three of these so that you can insure that you are going to deliver an on time, cost efficient, quality project to your client. •    Design:  In this stage of the recipe you need to make sure that you have communicated with your designer and given him/her all the clients wants, needs, and desires of the project to be able to deliver a delectable design the first time, thus again saving much time and money for the company. •    Coding & Content:  In this step again you need to have proper communication with your team and client to make sure you have everything you need from both parties so you can serve exactly what the client ordered. •    Quality Control:  Before a project is delivered it must be sent through a quality control process.  Quality control is an ingredient that often times gets overlooked, thus creating something very distasteful for the client and more than likely loosing money on the project.  You should have more than one person doing the quality check on the project to make sure that none of the ingredients have been left out. •    Delivery:  When you have followed all the steps you are now ready to deliver your client the project they ordered. By following some basic steps in the recipe it becomes a very simple solution to ensure that your projects are not being overcooked and that they are being delivered on time, are profitable, but most important are very satisfying to your client’s tastes, thus delivering the perfect meal for everyone.