Collaborating With Clients
Dragan on 22. Oct '07 9
We all know how client feedback can be. Some clients are “with you” throughout the project, each step of the way, and some appear to not be interested in it at all. Needless to say they all want grade A services for the money they pay. What I’d like to know is how do you go about making client-company (or freelancer, it doesn’t matter) collab and the working experience as painless and as less time consuming as possible?
Using Tools
Superawesome’s activeCollab instalation showing the dashboard
Here at Superawesome we use activeCollab as a project management and collaboration platform. We are also proud that we had gotten a chance to help shape it into the project it is today, and we continue to provide our friends at a51 the feedback and suggestions for improvements.
The thing with using software such as activeCollab to manage your collaboration is that not all clients are willing to use it. I find that the biggest challenge to overcome – to prove to them that we do it that way because it saves us both time, all remains there for future reference, all is written (there is no “Remember when I told you to…” but he/she actually didn’t).
Meetings
I personally find meetings in most part (even phone conferences) to be a major pain and generally a waste of time. People have the illusion that it is quicker than sitting down and writing an email, and it is not – when was the last meeting that took less than an hour of your time? And that’s not always billable time mind you. Also one of the biggest drawbacks of meetings is that in all that conversation to-do items tend to get lost and/or forgotten about, causing delay in the development.
Email is definitely the second-best option and it is what we fall back to if the client does not want to use activeCollab. The thing about using email for collaboration is that imho it doesn’t belong there – meaning that it’s very easy for an email containing feedback to get lost in an untidy inbox – your’s or the client’s.
We’re very interested in hearing how you are managing your projects and how you go about dealing with clients who seem uninterested in their own project, so please feel free to share a couple of thoughts in the comments.
I understand that you’re running a business and You’re out bring in as much money as possible as quickly as possible but i find your vision of how to streamline your services a litte short sighted. Remember; it is a service that You’re providing and if a client wants to talk to you, you shouldn’t be pressuring them into using foreign methods of project management. You come across as compensating for your lack of good communication skills by hiding being the system.
— Mark 26. October 2007, 00:55 #
Mark, I think it’s a bit of a long shot assuming we would refuse to talk to a client on her request – that’s ridiculous. The matter that I was discussing in this article was the most efficient way of collaboration and means to fix bad collaboration. If a tool is going to make the job easier and go faster – I’ll justify the “pain” that the client has to go through to use it.
— Dragan Babić 26. October 2007, 08:59 #
Hi Dragan. Do you find that sometimes a client, all of a sudden, becomes an expert designer and starts giving very bad advice on how a design should proceed?
— carl 29. November 2007, 21:42 #
Yeah Carl, all the time, and I’m pretty sure all designers get that from a good chunk of clients they work with. I believe it’s down to this – when people are paying for something – they also want to feel that they are in control of it. Partly it is because we are not selling physical products.
This behavior however is almost certainly counter-productive and it’s also compromising the quality of the end result. Some clients need to be assured that they are hiring you to do that for them. They should trust your judgement in what’s best for them – because that is a part of our jobs.
— Dragan Babić 30. November 2007, 07:13 #
I recently had a situation where the client procrastinated for 5 MONTHS as far as giving me the info and files I needed to finish a site. All of the sudden, they dumped everything on me and wanted it completed within 3 weeks!
Needless to say that I could not fulfill that request due to projects that had come through during their procrastination.
How should I deal with this type of situation in the future so that the client will not become upset when I am unable to do the impossible…
— LesIsMore 17. February 2008, 12:10 #
@LesIsMore – that is definitely a situation that happens from time to time. A part of your problem is the obvious ignorance of the client towards what he is actually paying you to do – he is obviously not clear on that. In order to grow a respectable and solid, trustworthy relationship with you clients you must educate them – show them what you will do for them and perhaps even show them how you do it and what needs to be done in the cope of the job.
Now in order to prevent these things from happening in the future – make a contract. A simple signed SOW document (statement of work) that clearly indicates both your and clients deliverables – including deadlines – should get people to take things more seriously.
— Dragan Babić 17. February 2008, 19:20 #
I both freelance and work full-time as a Creative Director. At work, we use Basecamp to collaborate with our clients and each other. (At home I use the free version of ActiveCollab, ProjectPier) At any given time we have 50-60 active projects in the works. I would say that 30-40% of our clients use Basecamp even though they all have accounts create upon contract signing and are given detailed information about Basecamp and how to use it. The clients who actually use it, love it. The other percentage of our clients tend to use email more often than not. It is rare to find a client that only communicates via phone or face-to-face meetings. In the case of “email clients”, we simply use the Basecamp project we created for their use to document every email we send/receive for that client. This creates a very detailed, timestamped record of our communication or attempted communication.
As to deadlines and clients who just will not deliver the needed resources to take their site live, we have a contract that every customer must sign before any work is done. We also have a Design Worksheet, Project Life Cycle, and Domain/Email Worksheet. Within all of these documents, there is a clearly visible note which states that if there is a delay in deliverables due to the client’s procrastination they are pulled out of production and place in a hold queue. To get out of that queue they must pay a production delay fee of $250. This has worked like a dream. Either they deliver what we need b/c they don’t want to get pulled out of production or they don’t care about this fee and we can pull them out of production and move on without worrying about it.
— Steven Trotter 24. February 2008, 21:36 #
Brilliant Steven, I think everyone should incorporate a production delay fee. I just wish I thought of that earlier!
I’m new at this and I’m just starting to feel the frustration of waiting for content and I’d like to nip this in the bud before it turns into a sprawsm mess.
I also agree completely with Dragan’s comment about meetings turning into a waste of time. Meetings are evil! Collaboration goes hand in hand with time management, I recommend the book 4HR Work Week which has some very useful ways to handle phone calls, emails, and meetings…
— Grant M. 28. February 2008, 14:32 #
Excellent post… I found that setting up the Incoming Mail, and creating an individual email for all client accounts and using each email account to import email into specific projects, did the trick for the clients who don’t want to use the project tool.
This way I still get their communication, and it’s a part of both of our records, and it allows them to be lazy about it…
I like the production fee idea… excellent idea.
I am a little more rabid… I’ve told customers if they don’t deliver their content in 14 days, their deposit is forfeit and the site goes into cold storage.
— sungoddess 28. June 2010, 13:06 #