Deadlines – Is There a Room To Negotiate Them In Web Development Industry?
In one of the previous post I was writing about estimates and commitments. I felt that this is an important topic because life shows that very often deadlines are beyond our control. I don’t know if it was only me, but I was living in a world where deadlines were always a matter of negotiations between a client and a supplier. Apparently this is not true for web development industry. This surprising (at least for me) truth was uncovered for me very recently when talking with the COO at Cognifide – Stuart Dean.
But if you think about it for a while, it actually makes sense. You have to realize that our clients are typically marketers. And for them, new website is most often only a part of a bigger venture. It can be a launch of a new product, new marketing campaign or some important for given industry conference. So from our client’s point of view all subprojects should end in more or less the same time. If one subproject has a delay then entire venture has a delay. In consequence new product or new campaign will be launched a few weeks later. And a few weeks delay can be converted into money not earned because of it.
Those are the market conditions we are living in. That’s why quite often we don’t have much room to negotiate deadlines. And that’s why the way to win and sign new contract is to come up with a realistic plan to meet those deadlines. Then simply we have to deliver them on time. I know – it’s easy to say, no so easy to do. But also that’s all what it takes to keep clients happy.
One of the important questions we always ask clients up front when they mention a deadline is: “What’s driving this deadline?”. Sometimes it comes out that the deadline is more an expectation, and actually they would rather have it two weeks later but with more features or more time for review and rework.
Other times you’ll find it’s some immovable barrier, such as “we must launch in time for the shareholder’s AGM” or “we must launch in time for the Christmas sales period”, etc. In these cases the negotiation stops being about time and starts to be about scope – if we’re going to make that deadline, we may need to cut something out…
Miro
27 Aug 10 at 10:01 am
Quite right Marek..
In the digital industry clients have deadlines for all sorts of reasons, product launches, launches to coencide with events, license renewals etc.. some are harder than others but in certain cases meeting a deadline means making money or not.. so when the client is paying literally paying our wages they do expect us to meet the date.
There is always room to manage scope, either by descoping (or simplication of) lower priority features in order to meet the date… but as a general rule when a deadline is drawing nearer teams (client and supplier) work harder as more unknowns come to light and MUST-HAVES! are uncovered.. This pressure then release cycle as deadline is met is what gives us our sense of achievement when a project is delivered.
Deadlines are common across all industries, ask an accountant about the pressure to deliver as they come upto a fiscal year end.. or a lawyer preparing for a big case.
Stu Dean
27 Aug 10 at 11:35 am
btw.. have a good holiday.. I’ll miss the posts while you’re away..
Stu Dean
27 Aug 10 at 11:36 am
@Miro and @Stu
Thanks a lot for additional insights!
Recently I have heard that quite often we are dealing with fixed time and fixed scope projects. It sounded quite risky so it’s good to learn that when deadline is a priority we can still control scope.
Marek Blotny
27 Aug 10 at 10:58 pm