How Targeted Client Collaboration Smoothes the Early Stages of a Project

Posted May 6, 2011 // 0 comments

As a project manager, I’ve definitely been in situations where clients ask for features that are out of scope. Often they’re responding to internal pressure that wasn’t initially part of our kick-off discussions - and so our Agile processes typically provides us the flexibility to have a conversation about these new features; perhaps we can re-prioritize, trade like for like on value, or simply agree to add the features as well as budget & timeline.

One related way we’ve been tackling enterprise project scope creep (in the traditional sense) is to bake client input into our strategic planning process very early on. Admittedly, this has been a cultural shift for us and places an increased amount of trust in both the client and the process. This is crucial, because at the end of the day, our web expertise has to support client goals and user goals alike.

So we’re now helping clients break from their day-to-day thinking about work and consider the web from new angles (and, in particular, their target users). By giving clients guidance early on about how they can think about their work from a web usability perspective, we’re then placing a value on how client contributions can improve UX & design (rather than bloat budgets, unnecessarily).

What we’ve found so far is that this change in thinking (and process) has positively impacted the consulting dynamic and, as a result, created stronger end results.

Here’s an example - We recently worked on a high-profile project that adopted a very Agile process and timeline. We maximized client discussions and education early on, spending a lot of time talking about the value to intuitive information architecture and user-centric experiences.

Then we encouraged them to consider what key actions and content areas would make their lives easier *and* their target audience’s too. Finally, we then asked them to tell us what content was a beast to update, what was irrelevant, and which sections, pages, or processes seemed obsolete. We had them document and compile findings with our help.

This process - education followed by a brain dump of ideas and then a consolidation of existing assets - resulted in the following:

• We avoided complications during the development process because we surfaced ideas not originally considered during the sales process discussions
• We refined ideas much earlier -- and nixed ideas that were too conceptual -- because the target audience was regularly part of discussions in a more tangible way (which gave us more grounding for IA and UX decisions, too)
• The conversations in general were more fun because the client team members were learning about our process of thinking and contributing to final product ideas because of that education, which was energizing

These three main takeaways are huge from a project perspective - they’re all incredibly beneficial. But I don’t want to gloss over the fact that involving clients in IA and UX is *not* necessarily easier, and it doesn’t save or cut budgets. It also doesn’t require that clients start creating 80-page audience-oriented documents on their end that dictate what our team builds (without collaborative discussion, that is). So it always comes back to balance.

But the main objective in this approach is to deliver a stronger, more effective product in the existing time and budget - and while creating more engaging team communications for all involved. And early signs are that those objectives are being met.