Steer Clear of Confused Clients - Educate Them

 

Does this sound familiar to you?
Your web shop has just won a big web-site development contract. Everything is going according to plan and you have a week left before the big glitzy Hollywood-style live preview the client CEO is going to give at a the venture capital conference. 

Sure, there were some delays and hiccups along the way, but you expected that and padded out your estimates as much as you could get away with. The client has already signed off the pre-release deliverables, and your accounts team is busy preparing the big invoice to send to the client.

Your project team is happily waiting for the big moment when suddenly one last round of revisions comes through. Then another...and another. You go back to your clients and tell them that every change request will be billed to the final invoice. They say, "What? You never told me I had to pay for revisions!" You don’t want to work free, and the client doesn’t want to overrun his budget. Nobody wants to budge, and in the meantime, the deadline is looming...

In a survey of more than 8,000 projects, the Standish Group found that the top three reasons that projects were completed late, over budget and not to the satisfaction of the client was a lack of user/client input, incomplete requirements specifications and changing requirements and specifications. A breakdown in communications could have been avoided if you had …

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