Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
What should have happened is that I should have quoted a fixed price for the first part of the job (the known part) and then charged per hour for the remaining part (with an estimate).
We now have a situation where as far as we are concerned the job is finished i.e. we know that any more hours spent will eat into profits/make is a loss - but the client is now starting to be aware of what could be possible and is also starting to request changes to the way the site functions/looks.
As with any change request some are straight forward quick changes, some the client thinks are straight forward but will take a while to sort out and some will just take ages to do full stop.
The problem is in the paper work - there is nothing definitive to go back to and say it has to be like exactly like this. Even if there was paper work was completed I doubt it would have been detailed enough to cover ever possible eventuality. I am constantly surprised about how many different ways a client can throw a spanner in the works by requesting changes to items never even envisaged at project start.
My client probably believes that he can keep making requests until the site is ‘right’ and that’s what he paid us for. Whereas I would like to get site ‘signed off’ so we can enter a post build phase of costs per change request.
Up to now we have been quite accommodating in handling the changes until the latest lot came through which involve quite a bit of work.
I am sure many people have had this scenario before – I would be interested in hearing how anyone has dealt with such projects in the past?
I'm dealing with a lot of smaller companies.. Small real estate shops, auto repair shops etc. The project creep there is horrible. The other problem is that when on onsite visit on a fixed price contract, the client would be answering the phone, dealing with employees and customers while I was there twiddling my thumbs.
I'm now doing everything on a per hour basis including phone support. If they want to gab with a customer, the clock keeps running. - Make sure they know that up front. The only tricky part is making sure they are aware of the payment arrangements and fully understand them.
There will be a few people who won't want to go with this..On the other hand I had too much time go into a black hole even with what I thought were carefully crafted quotations.
Part of the problem is that most of the time, people really aren;t sure what they want until they begin to see it. So, you mock up a prototype for them, and that reminds them that they want a couple of pictures here or there. You add those, and they realize they want shadows on the photos. You re-photoshop the pix, and they realize that they want different picture altogether.
I recently had to draw the line with a small B & B client, because I would say "ok - give me your final punch list" and they'd send me the punch list with things like "please add picture 1, 3 and 7 to the "about us" page. So I would, and they would then send yet another punch list with things like "please try a lighter shade of olive for the banner, and add picture #14 to the virtual tour".
Yes, some of that can me chalked up to "tweaks"...all part of getting the site just so, so that indeed, they are getting what they paid for. But with this client, after the latest email that asked for borders and shading to be added to some flash virtual tours, I replied back that that was going to require a significant amount of rephotoshopping, and reengineering of the flash files. I advised that I would be happy to do that, but that it would cost them another 6 hours in addition to the contract. They declined.
One thing I am considering doing henceforth is refusing to be the "ptohographer" for any of my clients, i.e. stopping out and taking the pics for the home page, the "accomodations" or virtual tours, etc. It's a tough decision because usually, the client produces garbage for digital photos, but I can't tell you how many times I have had to retake photos because they saw them on the site and didn't like the lighting, wished they would have straightenup up more, etc. Forget it.
SO how do you deal with it? Build in a few extra hours to your proposal for scope creep, for one. Try to clearly delineate how much will be delivered, and what that will take, time-wise. Absolutely have them sign off on the prototype design, color-wise, layout-wise, even down to the font. Once you move forward after that, if they start jacking with colors, image size, layout and more, simply advise them that it's outside of scope and it will take x number of hours.
It's a challenge, no doubt. It takes a great amount of diligence and communication.
Good luck!
A good example on this particular project is that towards the end the client has panicked about the look of their site and decided that the page needs movement (there not the first and won’t be the last!). So they have asked for us to design and construct some flash banner ads so that they can be inserted on their page. Again this wasn't in the original specification and as this graphical work is not really our company specialism it can take us a while to do sometimes. On this occasion we did the work - in hindsight we should have said no - as we should have foreseen other problems that would require our time before the official launch.
I don't know the answer, but they even talked about it on the West Coast Choppers show. Jesse James was complaining about having to move stuff a quarter of an inch to satisfy customers.
