No matter how much you plan, how well your spec is written and how many times you may or may not have prototyped a development project, there inevitably comes a time when the client changes their mind and wants changes made to an ongoing project. In a well designed code base, even pretty significant changes often aren’t a problem, but even so I frequently find myself feeling slightly aggrieved at the change.
Now this is silly. I get paid by the hour, so any change I’m asked to make costs the client the amount of time it takes for me to make that change. From a business point of view this is great, it’s all extra work keeping me busy and paying the bills. It’s also the best kind of work – raw coding hours with no time spent in meetings or writing proposals.
So why do I feel narked at having to make changes? I guess it boils down to being passionate about what I do and not wanting to see the client waste money. The ideal scenario for any project is that it goes as smoothly and quickly as possible, therefore getting to the end result with minimum expenditure. No one wants to pay more for a project than necessary, and I don’t like thinking my clients aren’t getting good value. Wasting time frustrates me.
But then there’s also the more selfish side of me that thinks “oh FFS, I’ve just written that!” and despairs at knowing a whole chunk of code I’ve laboured over is just going to get deleted and never make it into production. But really I think that just comes down to caring about my work too. So on the whole I don’t think I need to worry about taking it personally.
I think it’s ok to feel rotten about deleting a bunch of work. Don’t you?
Comments
Change is inevitable. Embrace it etc. etc.
Me too!
Apart from lost time and nice code going down the drain, one of the main issues with a client changing their mind is that, when the time to wrap up the project comes, they have conveniently forgotten how many times they’ve changed their minds and tend to blame you, the person who did the work, for all the time and money lost. In the worst case scenario, it might end up damaging your reputation with other customers. The only solution we have found against this is a complete change log, where every single change requested by the customer is documented, along with time and effort required to implement the change. And even then, they still blame you for it. Not that it’s a blame culture you understand but they have to report to the powers that be who want to understand why their pet project was late and above budget.
Ah well, if it was too easy, it wouldn’t be fun I suppose :-)
Clients sometimes have no idea, do they?
However most clients don’t have an idea about the impact some ‘little asides and changes’ have. Not only the technical and cost impacts, but also the personal. Reversly most evelopers don’t have an inkling about the countless hours some girl or bloke at the clients had to spend, trying to stop the change, explaing and generally talking their heads off, but finally losing the battle.
I cringe at one major site I maintain, it’s my best, most popular site, but giving the client the option to keep the page text updated… means he’s put cheesy animated gifs on the front page [weep].
This reminds me of the current situation Im currently in with one of my clients. We have been coding a very flash intensive site with tons of action script and all sorts of xml feeds. This has been one of the most time consuming projects we have ever taken on and it looks like it won’t be done till the end of this month (started it in October).
Basically the story goes, we were chugging along through mid December, when out of no where they call us and tell us, they had some sort of “vision” of this amazing new design they would prefer. So we end up scrapping 2.5 months of work and a 90% completed site, only to have to start from scratch again. They claim the new design will be much more beneficial to their company image, but we think the original design was better. So now we all feel kind of bitter, dissapointed, and we feel like we are wasting our clients money. Its such a bizarre feeling to get paid a lot of money for something someone just throws away, and then asks you to rebuild for even more money….
We doubt this client will be in business for very long with these spending habits :)
I share your thought about trying not wasting the clients money. I think that’s a good starting point. But sometimes it seems the client has money to waste?!
I’m working on a piece of software that tries to overcome some of the problems of working with that kind of clients. Especially in the field of information analysis. Have a look: www.interactivemeta.com