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| Why defining a project scope is important |
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During my first years as an independant web developer, I made a lot of mistakes. A LOT. But the biggest one was that I did not know how to accurately define each project's scope. The truth is, I was afraid to set limits because I thought it might scare the customer away. However as time passed, it became clear that I was losing money.
Customers would ask and ask and ask, and I wanted to make them happy, so I kept piling on the work, always thinking, "I will just add this as a freebie and finally wrap up the project". Guess what? that never happened, there was no way it could happen because there was no pre-established end to the project. The place to set these parameters is when you are first quoting the work. Your experience will let you know how much time and resources will be needed, and based on that you have to set the limits. On web development this includes not only the planning phase, but also the material delivery and one of the most important but almost always forgotten, the testing phase. You need to set a limit to the testing/debugging phase after the project is finished. If you don't the customer will think any new feature that they "assumed" was included in the original project, is still pending. Many times a lot of frustration takes place due to lack of communication or miscommunication. One well known technique is to go through everything with the client after a meeting. This was something we did when I was working at Dell, at the end of the order, I would go through the entire order to make sure the specifications were correct. Guess what? I never got a return on any of my sales, the client got what he ordered and nothing less. There is a lot of documentation on "requirement specification" but I have read some of my own quotes and I suspect most of our clients might not understand what each feature is, or how it works. I have had customers tell me that they read the quote but did not understand a thing (even when I thought I had explained each point in basic terms), other simply requested "give me a number". It all adds up to expectations. If you don't agree on them your client will be frustrated and dissapointed in you and your web development firm, and you lose money and get negative publicity (and lots of it). So remember to be precise, double check with the customer and make sure both of you are in agreement before starting a project. |
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