Rocks into Gold

Clarke Ching – whose work I’ve been reading for a while, is preparing to publish a short parable for these troubled times. Get in touch with him via this post, and grab a copy, after all the more weapons in our armoury, the better chance we have of winning the inevitable battles.

I want problems, not solutions!

So, there I was, quietly listening into a conference call between a couple of clients on one side, and the account manager, project manager and me on the other.

We were going through a small project that we’d just completed for the purposes of getting sign-off. We had built in the functionality they wanted, using the designs that they’d agreed to, so it was plain sailing.

And then the spanner.

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A grown-up conversation

Several places I’ve worked have spoken about the client in two contrasting ways: one, hushed tones suggesting that they’re too sensitive to handle whatever reality we’re dealing with; two, derision suggesting that they’re too much of an idiot to understand whatever reality we’re dealing with.

Both are clearly untrue (to greater or lesser degrees), and both serve to make our jobs harder because they distance us from the most important person in any project.

So here’s a list of questions I would like answered:

• why do we keep secrets from clients?
• why are we so keen to promise tight deadlines?
• why do we try to squeeze in extra stuff for them?
• what if we treat them as part of the team?
• what if we made them fully aware of the repercussions of their decisions?
• what if we made demands of them, in order to deliver
• what if we explain how risk builds up, and what they can do to mitigate it?

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Project in distress (IV)

I particularly like this one: a week has passed, whilst the project manager has been “working” with the designer on the definition of 3D behaviour of playing cards on the site. His output landed in my in box yesterday afternoon: it was a list of cards, and the places they would sit in on the site.

This information was available in the original pitch document! So has it really taken a week to change the document format?

Finding out what’s best …

Just doing our best ain’t good enough – we need to be more savvy than that and work out precisely what’s the best thing to do first. So far, we’ve identified the conflict, and we now need to assess possible solutions.

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Project in distress (III)

It’s Monday, so I’m back with fresh energy. Soon sapped by the realisation that if we ballpark 2 months for development (excluding testing/bugfixing), we need to start at the beginning of June. Which means the designs have to be finalised and signed-off within 3 weeks, and we haven’t even agreed all the content for the site yet.

Here’s a twist I haven’t come across before – the site is companion to a quarterly members’ magazine, so the design has to cover both versions. As a result, the print designers of the magazine get to take the lead on the look’n'feel and design, and once they’re happy hand it off to the digital designer. All within 3 weeks obviously.

None of the designers have worked with me before, so this’ll be double fun.

Oh, and there’s a “secret” area of the site for magazine subscribers. So secret, apparently, that we aren’t yet privy to what will go in it.

An evaporating conflict cloud

Doing our best doesn’t guarantee success, despite best intentions. How do we identify the behaviours that we want and don’t want, and find the inherent conflicts within the system?

Let’s take one of the problems in the previous article (It’s not rocket science), and see what’s driving it, which may give us a better perspective towards possible fixes.

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It’s not rocket science

How is it that people work hard for long hours, and yet projects fail? Why do project debriefs become bitter tales of one team thwarting another? How can we be doing our best, and yet see it fall apart so spectacularly?

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Diary of a project in distress (II)

I’ve spent today going through all the documents with a fine toothcomb, to extract a list of business, technical, and design requirements. I’ve come away with a long list of questions (most of which can’t be answered yet, I suspect).

Tomorrow is the day for digging out the answers.

Will someone please charge for our creativity?

Why is it that digital creative agencies often only get paid for their implementation, and provide their creativity free? Unpaid-for work creates financial risk, resulting in rushed work when it’s most important.

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