Hello again!
I had a client come to me last week with a budget of £135,000 for a complete redesign of their website. They were only talking to me and had no procurement process or competitive tender. They wanted my help to make it happen.
Guess how much I signed a contract for. Seriously, think of a number.
The actual figure was £9,000. I bet that was a lot lower than you expected. That is because I only encouraged the client to sign up for a discovery phase, not the entire project.
In fact, in all my years of running Boagworks, I cannot think of a time when I signed a contract for more than £10,000. Most of my engagements are less than half of that.
No, this is not because I am a terrible salesman. It is because I am a great believer in taking small steps when trying to undertake more extensive projects.
My Problem with Large Projects
Large projects make me nervous for three reasons.
The Potential for Mistakes Is Larger
First, larger projects come with more stakeholders, more dependencies, and increased complexity. These factors are a recipe for disaster. Things get overlooked with so much going on. People tend to rush on to the next step in the process.
Realistic Planning Is Impossible
Then there is the fact that realistically planning a big project is nearly impossible. With so much going on, any timelines or costings are likely to be a work of fiction.
Sure, in theory, it should be possible to list every task and then estimate for each. However, that doesn’t take into account inevitable changes. Even if the quote could be accurate, the time it would take to produce an estimate in that detail would be a considerable investment in itself and slow down the project significantly.
The Cost of Failure Is Higher
When so much planning goes into the project upfront, it increases the pressure on the project team to succeed. On top of that, these big budgets and extended timelines mean that the cost of failure is huge.
These projects become too big to fail, meaning companies end up pouring more and more money into them as they struggle to deliver to unrealistic expectations. Of course, this only further increases the cost of failure.
Bad for Clients and Bad for Suppliers
The situation is even worse if the organization commissioning the work is relying on a supplier to deliver. The client insists on a fixed price to manage risk, which means a fixed scope needs to be agreed upon.
That leads to guesses about what needs to be delivered and a reluctance to change direction mid-project, even if the data suggests you should.
This approach puts suppliers in an impossible situation of providing a quote for a poorly defined project, with no flexibility to adapt once the project kicks off.
Not that it is any better for clients. Clients are expected to pick a supplier for the project based on very little knowledge. The chance of making a wrong decision is enormous, and the cost of doing so even larger.
By breaking projects down into smaller steps, the client gets to test the relationship with the supplier, and the supplier gets to better understand and deliver on each stage.
Bad for Internal Development Too
But big projects are destructive for internal development teams too. They make scheduling impossible, cause issues with managing multiple projects simultaneously, and leave them spending way too much time managing stakeholders rather than getting work done.
Not Just Limited to Large Projects
I would argue most projects could benefit from being broken down into smaller steps with a series of limited scope engagements. Even smaller projects could easily have standalone discovery phases and prototyping. That might be a single workshop for each, but it would still keep people focused, allow relationships to be built, and better scope the direction of the next step.
Essentially, each mini-project informs the next one allowing for more accurate planning and quoting while (when combined with testing) ensuring you are building the right thing.
Take, for example, any website redesign project of any reasonable size. That could easily consist of five mini-projects:
- Discovery — Focusing on goals, users, the offering, and context.
- Wireframing — Focusing on content, information architecture, and page layout.
- Design — Focusing on branding and aesthetics.
- Build — Where the site gets built.
- Post-Launch — Focusing on post-launch optimization and conversion rate optimization.
By breaking it down in this way, each project will help define the one that follows it while allowing parties to better focus on the specific deliverables of that stage.
Addressing the Drawbacks
Look, I understand your concerns about working in this way. The client wants to know how much the project will cost before undertaking it, and the supplier likes the idea of tying the client in for the whole project. But, ultimately, these reduce the likely success of the project.
The client can still get a sense of potential budgets without fixing them in stone because, let’s be honest, that never works anyway.
As for the supplier, I find that smaller projects lead to happier clients, and happier clients want to keep working with you.
If you are unsure, unconvinced, or have questions, drop me an email. I am happy to talk it over with you because I believe we should take smaller steps and kill off the high-risk redesign project.
Thanks,
