These are my suggestions to lock things down, make a group called let's say coders.
The group coders is all the web developers on your team.

# So let's make the group for coders:
$sudo groupadd -g 10000 coders
# Let's add out first web developer to the new group called coders:
$sudo usermod -a -G yourUSERNAME coders

# If you made the coders group, let's assign it to the project:
sudo chgrp -R coders /var/www/new_dev/
# Let's make that group Sticky, so new files/folder will belong to it:
sudo find /var/www/new_dev/ -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;
# Let's allow coders to read/write to the project, but everyone else like
# ... the web server have just Read access.
sudo find /var/www/new_dev/ -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;
# Assign Read/Write/eXecute to all coders and 
# ... execute bit only for others like web-server, etc...to the view files/folders.
sudo find /var/www/new_dev/ -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

# Assuming your web server belongs to the group called www-data, let's allow the
# ... server to modify these important folders only:
sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/new_dev/logs
sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/new_dev/configs
sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/new_dev/services

# So, you probably want to allow cron-jobs to run code. Let's make it executable:
sudo chown +x /var/www/new_dev/cli_cron