“Ha. Just kidding. But seriously, we need it no later than a week.” “Two weeks, max.” “We have a hard deadline in a month.” “We have to be live in two months.”
We’ve lost countless jobs because we wouldn’t commit to these sorts of deadlines. And almost every single one misses its target when the prospective client goes elsewhere, with a consultancy happy to lie about timelines.
But this post is no rant against those conmen consultants; such behaviour is rife in new markets and we professionals must take the rough with the smooth. It’s our challenge to set the standards of best practice.
Rather, this post is a plea to the impatient: please listen to someone who’s seen literally dozens of enthusiastic entrepreneurs make big compromises for deadlines, often only to miss them anyway. Quality takes time! You can’t cheat it. In the words of Edwin H. Chapin:
Impatience never commanded success.
16 Comments
Allelujah Eoghan. Absolutely spot-on. That is all.
Posted by Anton Mannering at 11:56 am on 20 August, 2009.
Loved your post man. That’s only one type of that kind of issue. What about those that needed it for yesterday and even though they agreed to the timeline proposed, they make you wait for payment, content, etc, etc?
Others make you waste a lot of time negociating a price (making you believe that the tight budget is the “only” issue) and even though you make an effort to balance the work hours with a price more in accordance…that’s stil not good.
Today’s main problem is that “people know the price of everything and the value of nothing”. That’s why it’s very difficult to understand that “quality takes time!” for them.
Best
Fred
Posted by Fred at 12:02 pm on 20 August, 2009.
True this, it is the bane of our lives, we all get burnt at some stage with this.
But was it not too long ago you guys were advocating rapid development and deployment and using Task Five and Twecipe as examples of this, or were these simply corner cases?
Posted by Ray at 12:08 pm on 20 August, 2009.
9 women can’t make a baby in a month
Posted by Steve Quinlan at 12:08 pm on 20 August, 2009.
I think a lot of it is that people don’t rate design in it’s guises enough to learn about it or get an appreciation for it - it’s not taken as seriously as most other aspects of a companies business and treated in an off hand manner. Many times I’ve done projects to deadlines purely because a client is going away on holidays - it seems bizarre to me that if you’re spending a lot of money on a logo / website / ad that you’d sabotage it from the off by putting an unrealistic deadline on it. I think Des’ post a few days ago was spot on in that we need to educate our clients to make it easier to work with them.
Posted by John O'Connell at 12:24 pm on 20 August, 2009.
Great post, but one that will fall on deaf ears, I’m afraid, under of a welter of “I need a logo in an hour”.
Posted by Mike Kiely at 12:27 pm on 20 August, 2009.
Ray:
Hi there. Good question.
We do advocate rapid development iterations. And if we can build an app in a week, we will. In circumstances where you have tight control of a very small spec, like we did for TaskFive and Twecipe, it’s a feasible approach.
But even in these circumstances, the project will still take a week. My point is that you can’t cheat time. Some apps need a week, some a month, six months, a year and if you want to do it right, you’ll need to be patient and invest the time.
Posted by Eoghan McCabe at 12:33 pm on 20 August, 2009.
I love this post…right on the money, and I think these expectations are something unavoidable. Its what happens when fast food culture meets art. Perhaps the question we need to ask ourselves as an industry is, instead of telling the client they are being unreasonable that we try to find production methods that move things faster. This is my passion - and I want to qualify this with saying I am not a designer myself. What I do know, though, is that we need to find ways to produce quality for lower and lower budgets, and that everybody wants everything yesterday.
Posted by Mark Sorsa-Leslie at 1:37 pm on 20 August, 2009.
I think the issue we come up against most often is something that Fred mentioned: client calls and requires job to be completed in a week/fortnight etc. We discuss and eventually come to an agreement if we decide it is worthwhile. Usually what happens after this point is that we’re confounded by complete failure to respond to any content requests etc by the client. In some cases this results in the job taking 2-8 times as long as the original time-line dictated.
It’s a preposterous way to work, and whilst we try to educate people from the first step as to how the process works and how such jobs may not be entirely dependent on our work process but also on the client providing information, it’s not something that is easy to truly get home to some people.
It’s actually gotten to such a point that I’ve considered starting up a copy-writing service as more often than not I end up writing half the content for clients out of frustration of being unable to get any response!
Posted by Alex Leonard at 3:14 pm on 20 August, 2009.
Thats an excellent point Alex, I have dealt with this a lot, it’s bad enough when staff procrastinate (you should allow for this anyway) but when clients do it a project is screwed, regardless of the set timeframe.
The way we try to deal with it now is to get the client to sign the content off before hand (if we can), page by page if appropriate and according to any site maps or agreed requirements.
Of course in the real world it does not always work like this, at first we took the totalitarian approach and wouldn’t budge on the build untill this happened - this did not work, we took a softer approach and this did not work either as we ended up back where we started.
We found getting the client involved as much as possible in the project and that by taking small iterative sign-off steps to a project work best - the client is not left in limbo for a prolonged period of time and when they see constant progress (even if it’s only a sketch) they tend to take more ownership of the project, and “get the finger out”, so to speak.
It would be the best job in the world if there were no clients.
Posted by Ray at 5:15 pm on 20 August, 2009.
It’s generally best to avoid these types of projects. 95% of the time, the timeline is a total fabrication. In the rare situation they actually need a project done in two weeks, it’s usually because they somehow screwed it up to begin with. Neither are positive attributes when it comes to clients.
Posted by GigPow at 8:30 pm on 20 August, 2009.
11 posts and not one from a client yet. I’ve been on the other side of the table dozens of times both with internal design/engineering or an external firm. It is certainly true that entrepreneur can get caught up in their own enthusiasm and create fictitious drop dead dates in the hope that it will result in shortened cycles. However, as all business is rife with deadlines it more likely the client does actually have some deadline that they need met, but it is very likely that they don’t actually need the finished project to meet the deadline.
I think a lot of these problems can be avoided by trying to understand the nature of the clients deadline and to work out exactly what they need for that time frame.
For example they may have a meeting with a potential investor or customer and feel that they need to be able to demonstrate the product. In case they don’t need the finished product, you may be able to spike something out of the main project to meet this deadline for the client.
For any supplier/customer relationship to work there needs to be respect between the parties. The customer needs to respect the supplier’s skills, timeline & costs, and similarly the supplier needs to respect the customer’s deadlines.
Posted by Caelen at 11:41 am on 27 August, 2009.
I love the general philosophy of this post. I’m in a position where I must make project arrangements and negotiations with print and design contractors, a task delegated to me by a superior who has unreasonable expectations about how quickly things can be done. I loathe being the person who has to say, “I need this . . . the sooner the better . . . is tomorrow too soon?” because I know, of course, it is! But I’m asking on behalf of someone who does not know. Worse, because he is never the one to communicate directly with the contractors, he never gets a sense of what is and is not realistic directly from the source; when something can’t be done, he assumes it’s because I haven’t been aggressive enough. I’ve taken to sending a lot of thank you notes, separate from our payments, to try to win back some karma.
Posted by Emily at 5:45 am on 29 August, 2009.
I think this all brews down to clients who come up with an idea, set out to find someone who can implement it, and then expect that whomever they hire can just do it right then and there. “This IS what you do…right?”
It’s actually sadly hard to fault them, because 98% of them have no idea what it takes to actually deliver what they are asking for. So how do you change their expectations? How do you turn down that huge profitable project when they really do want it yesterday and have no problem finding the rogue firms who will over promise and under deliver?
Posted by Matt Dyson at 12:20 am on 1 October, 2009.
Good article, thank you
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Posted by Earth at 4:02 pm on 8 October, 2009.
I couldn’t agree more. It is imperative that we start educating the clients first and make them understand that Quality work takes time. The sad part is that people often equate “Time” with “Tantrums” thrown by the Design Agency. They couldn’t be more wrong. If only they see the amount of effort that goes into executing an idea, would they understand and appreciate our work. I have yet to come across a client who does; But am optimistic that sooner or later, I will have loads of clients who do.
BTW - Loved “9 women can’t make a baby in a month” lol
Posted by Seema at 9:26 am on 21 October, 2009.
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Posted by HeyBuzz – The Blog of Pete Usborne » Blog Archive » Dead lie… at 9:34 am on 21 August, 2009