Working in the web design industry is challenging, rewarding and fun.
After talking to a buddy from the big end of town property development space & a digital project manager, I thought I would write a quick post on the outcomes.
So please read the below, it could save your project tens of thousands of dollars & time; do good research, and really own your participation in the project, also finding a quality vendor with good experience is very helpful.
These lessons could be applied to any project, holiday, business plan, Dick Smith kit build.
These opinions are not representative of any particular client or company experiences, just third party observations taken from discussion with some peers.
The Challenge.
One big challenge seems to be in convincing clients to really participate, buy in & own the the project their end (when web is not a core business of theirs), a tough thing also is that web design has been some what commoditiesed, particularly when any 16 year old kid can whip up a web site in a day or so, so value in investing time & money can be a hard fought perception to build.
My eyes have really been opened to the importance of scoping, planning, comuncation & truely partnerning to hit quality web build outcomes based on some discussion. When people are investing six figure sums of money, mutual input & team spirit is needed.
Close rigor, the meeting of minds, open communication & ownership can greatly mitigate risk & delivery high quality outcomes, the opposite is also true when these are not present.
One commercially negative factor that seems to be a theme in some large enterprise builds is the lack of internal resourcing & ownership (traction), ad-hoc changes, on the fly reviews, gaps in planning documents, bureaucracy and no clear focus on scope.
All these things are totally fine from a service provider point of view, the thing is, some clients just don’t seem to see the link to additional costs to budget & timelines, when push comes to shove, there is an expectation for the vendor to bite the bullet, I am sorry, just like in traditional construction all of the above are billable.
The Outcome.
The outcome is also compromised as the build can be a mishmash with stakeholders getting confused as to who requested what, why, how come, why did it take so long etc etc. No one wants to tell their boss it was because the internal company project team lost it’s barring, so it also end in a mud slinging match to pass the buck to the vendor in some instances, it the old cover your bum game.
Granted there are some doggy vendors out there, but be aware, there are also some clients whose internal structure can prove equally inefficient.
When you make such changes, the risk, times, line & cost all blow out, it is not conceivable in such technically complex builds for the vendor to soak up these additional efforts for no fee.
The Example.
A good example on this is from a Grand Design Abroad episode I saw recently (they are all good, they even cover some examples of great outcomes, run well and effectively), this show is a great example of exactly what the web design industry goes through.
We have requirements gathering work shops, IA/wire frames/funct spec all which are equivalent of traditional planning docs for construction, we have project schedules & the project schedule methodology is very similar. They are all very important to ensuring a quality build, contolling expectation & budgets & managing the time line.
Here is a link to the episode which really hammered it home for me and parallels many dangers which can occur without good planning documents, strong levels of communications, discipline, change management process and general risks (rain, weather, randomness, holidays).
This British couple built a house in Spain, they spoke no Spanish, their build team spoke no English, the couple also embarked on ad-hoc changes mid build, knocked walls out on the fly, had no direction or dates in mind.
The timeline went out the window & the budget blew out by 20%, the good thing was that the couple took ownership/personal responsibility of the challenges their approach added to the build, I am not sure if this would happen in a large organisation.
As said, this is all do able, just be aware that there is a cost associated, so please don’t blame your vendor when you go off the map & start ad-libbing like Coltrane that the timeline & budget have blown out.
Invest the time and money, communicate, ask questions, trust your professional consultants, it will pay you back ten fold.
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Jamie is passionate about people, business and technology. He works at one of Australia's big 5 full service digital agencies across a range of SMEs to large ASX listed companies. He is an Account Director with a wealth of experience and enjoys; mountain biking, Muay Thai/BJJ, reading, creative business thinking and technology.