Everyone starts a project with the greatest of hopes. This is probably one of the biggest problem areas. There is always a ‘getting to know each other’ period that lasts a few meetings. However, not until you start to do the real work - make decisions on the scope of the project and establish the costs, do you really confront the issues that affect the working relationships. Who’s going to do what and when, plus “What's this project going to cost me?”

Keeping an open mind until you reach this phase is important. You will know when you hit this point! It's that time in the project when the Key Decision Maker makes their first assessment of the project and gives everyone involved their blessing or criticism. If the Key Decision Maker is involved in the project from the beginning, this part of the process moves smoothly. Unfortunately, most Key Decision Makers do not have the time to actively participate in this process and only look at the project in snapshots, coming in at the last moment to approve the project and the costs.

The solution is to make hard fast ground rules that everyone agrees on upfront before the contract is signed. One ground rule we live by is that if the Key Decision Makers are not going to be involved in the process that they remove themselves from the Key Decision Maker role. If they do not have a replacement within their company, then they must make themselves available to our design team in a timely manner to sign-off at each major step; failure to do this will slow down the project and add to the overall costs. The scope of the project must be written down, along with the costs and everyone signs-offs on them.

Two major things we watch out for:

Mission Creep – This is where the client wants to make several small changes that for the most part are easy changes with little costs. The issue is that this practice can and does get out of control unless the scope of the project is adhered to. Our policy is … once the phase has been signed-off on; small changes over 15 minutes are considered ‘Mission Creep’! Once these small changes exceed 2 hours, the hourly rate will be added to the original costs.

Major changes late in the process – This mostly happens when the Key Decision Maker reviews the project after a lot of time has passed and forgets that they signed-off on that phase. They come in and say “Make these changes” and when they hear there is a cost to make the changes they are reminded about our policies. This happens only in a very few cases but we do have a procedure to control this. It’s called the sign-off or we stop the project. We make sure that the Key Decision Maker signs-off at agreed upon places in the project. Failure to sign-off will cause the project to stop. If you are a Key Decision Maker that has a habit of handling projects in this manner, we are not the right company for you.

Our approach may seem a bit strong but we have learned over the years that if the Key Decision Maker's Expectations are not managed correctly there will be issues.

Clear and frequent communication is the answer.

So as you see… our design strategy is to make sure that the person approving the payment of the project is kept in the loop.