Did you ever experience scope creep ? Well, then read this !

You might already have read that one, since it’s been published in april 2007 : I didn’t and I am glad I finally came upon it... thought I would share

It describes what has happened to lost of us freelance (I know it happens a lot to me and I try to improve but it’s hard to do) : scope creep, and offers a few wise solutions to prevent it...

http://www.agencybyte.com/2007/04/10/defining-project-boundaries-and-keeping-your-client-within-them/

Good reading !

A very interesting article. I particularly liked:

If you can’t assume the worst when estimating your time, then do your optimistic estimates and double it later.

Thanks for sharing

Ah and while I am here, another very educating one on a related subject :
Are you working for free ?

Check out this blog by the way, lots of nuggets... it speaks to my short experience as a freelance !
There is some added value in those advices, believe me

We’re just finishing a project whose scope has creeped so much that it barely resembles what we put in our original (very specific) agreement. I say "finished", but that’s not really the case, since I’m pretty sure that this project will never actually be finished, and I fear I’ll be working on it at least half-time for the rest of my life. I’m sure many of you can relate.

I’m starting to come to the conclusion that there are some clients that I should just refuse to work with, and they’re not the ones that I would’ve expected I’d be thinking this about. We tend to work for three types of clients: Corporate clients (for which we feel absolutely no affinity and have no trouble charging market rates), Non-profit, Do-gooder, or Friends of Friends clients (for whom we charge less and are much more willing to do additional work), and Pro Bono (clients who are doing things that we support enough that we’re happy to volunteer our time). It’s a subgroup of this second class (non-profits, do-gooders, and friends of friends) that is really killing us lately.

Because we are charging them (albeit less than what we’d charge a corporate client), they feel entitled to make demands. And because they tend to only have the vaguest notion of what they need or want, it’s very difficult to define the project’s scope in a mutually-understood way. But the really key issue is that because we feel a personal affinity for them or the work that they’re doing, we tend to let them get away with things we’d never accept from a corporate client.

I think that there are now two warning buzzers regarding these clients that I need to learn to heed:

The first is extreme vagueness on the part of the client. If it seems as if their entire project (not just the website) is a muddle and it’s difficult to get any clarity on decisions, steer clear. This will definitely become a major issue (besides "scope creep", the other thing that often makes us work much more than necessary is when clients fail to provide the content and direction that they’ve agreed to provide, and then try to put the onus of creating the content for their website on you).

The second warning buzzer is how willing we feel to go the extra mile for this client. If we’re friendly with them or feel like their business or project deserves our support, it’s all too easy for us to agree to do things that were never part of the bargain. So either we need to adopt a much less "friendly" attitude towards these clients, or if we prefer to remain friends or supporters first then perhaps we shouldn’t take them on as business clients.

I don’t know if other freelancers out there can relate, but I know that for me it’s been difficult to learn how to reject such clients, especially based on just a "bad feeling" brought on by these two warning signs. But I’m going to learn to do it, dammit. I knew in my gut that this recent client would be a nightmare, and yet we took the job anyway. We could’ve made a whole lot more money during this time with a great deal less stress if I’d just followed my gut feeling and recommended they contact someone else. From now on, vagueness + affinity = here’s some recommendations, but we don’t have time to work on this project with you, sorry.

That is interesting ZAP, not least because I got a call last week from a friends friend who needed a "simple" website for a team doing.

The Simple Webpage included:

• A database that contains all the start times for all the athletes and their times in all previous events and someway of displaying that
• Online registration to include a return email that has worked out the cost depending on the date to event date difference. Group registration with just one payment. Automatically transfers this person (or persons) to an online archive so others can see who is taking place.
• A newsletter - If it wasnt for easy newsletter that on it’s own could be a few hours work. Plus the words "newsletter function" are very vague indeed.
  
• Directions - as a PDF and as a link to a map
• Routes they run - also as PDF - They have no idea of how many routes I would need to create in PDF format.
• FAQ
• Advertisements & Sponsoring
• Guestbook
• Gallery & comments about events including an archive
• Numerous user groups and manager groups that are only allowed to administer certain topics

I suggested they try somewhere else. The initial contact and the list told me that neither the site or the contact were going to be easy. I did feel a little bad about passing it up, not only because it would have been a few [glow=green,2,300]$$$[/glow] extra, but also because it was the friend of a friend, but the more I think about it...the less I feel bad.

Cheers,
Taff

Don’t feel bad! You dodged a bullet there, brother. When people ask for difficult, time-consuming things and refer to it as "simple", you know they’re not going to pay you what it’s worth!

Great feedback guys, yeah ZAP I most definitely relate to what you said !

One downside of going down that road is not only will you work for the minimum wage (or worse) but you’ll burn out bit by bit and the quality of your work will suffer. In the end, you loose. I know I had to bite this bullet since I was totally new to this business and needed work to prove myself (not so long ago I was a total quality consultant, my major is business and administration ).

One thing which makes it easier to defend your prices is :

1) know the value of your work for your client : Of course it’s really hard to define how much added value a well thought out website will bring to a client : you can’t reasonnably estimate a figure, but you can for sure use a few things. First, having a few studies and figures handy about the internet market can help. Second, compare : something I often do is, show them their competitor’s websites. It helps when you can offer ideas to improve on those and go the extra mile.

2) know the time, money and skills you put into your business... and make it clear to your client I tried a few time tracking software, but the one which really got my attention is Billings which handles time tracking but invoices as well...currently testing this. I still wait for the release of ActiveCollab 1.0 (already use 0.7.1 for project management), which include a time tracking tool to see if Billings is necessary or not.

It’s really important to keep track of time spent on projects. Lots of small tasks add up to real significant time spent ! Start measuring and you’ll see you spend way more time than you thought on a project...