I have three projects that are slated to begin this week, and at the close of business on Monday I am still waiting on three project outlines from my clients, ha. One of my partners, Greg Smart, posted a good article on his blog a while back about this same topic.
This is something that all of us in the development community run into from time to time, we have our task lists emptied out and are ready to embark on a new client project and all of a sudden we find ourselves waiting on content or a project outline from the client.
It’s not the client’s fault, they are usually just wrestling with the reality that putting together a website outline or writing content for the web is a little harder than they had first thought, and unless you have done it you really don’t realize this up front. It’s still a frustrating thing for us as developers because here we sit ready to go to work and have all of our ducks in a row and we have to wait…
Over the years I have learned that one of the biggest mistakes a developer can make is to rush his client to make critical decisions regarding their project outline or “navigation”, they will inevitably “miss something” that will need to be coded in later and it usually ends up adding a few additional hours to the project, if not more down the road. The best thing I have learned is to just be patient.
There are a few things that you can do to sort of get the ball rolling during the discovery phase of a project that I have used in the past with mixed results. One of these tricks is to build a discovery document, MS Word or Excel work great for something like this, just build the document with standard questions that will enable you to build an outline for the project and at least get a starting point. In this project discovery you should ask some tough questions that maybe the client hasn’t considered before and make them think. By putting together a discovery document on the front end of a project you can probably cut out a few hours of development time down the road…
Another technique that I have been exploring lately is the use of UML (universal markup language) to build a project outline in flowchart form. This helps put a visual face on project and gives the client a better perspective to what their project is going to include as well as how it is going to be organized.
These are just two examples, I would love to hear from some other developers out there that have ran into this situation before and what techniques they use to overcome this fact of life. Please be sure to comment…
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