Managing collaboration
Managing collaboration is difficult—but we’ve done a lot of it. We’ve found that the three secrets to successful project management are timing, communication and realism.
It’s all in the timing
We’re adept at writing a scope that realistically fits within your budget and time constraints, but also meets your strategy. Instead of trying to do everything at once, you’ll need to prioritize—usually by separating the work into several phases, and launching features progressively. And if your aims are overambitious, and you risk failure as a result, we’ll let you know up front.
Milestones—who, what and when
A key element of the scope will be a set of milestones—identifiable points in time when we or you commit to doing something. A milestone could be releasing a prototype (us), getting internal agreement on a naming system (you), or calling a meeting to discuss strategy (both of us). We’re dead serious about meeting our milestones—as long as you’ve met yours.
Face-to-face collaboration
Although a lot of the work of web design is done remotely, face-to-face meetings are an essential part of our process. Interspersed with the milestones we’ll plan a series of meetings, when project sponsors can collaborate in person with our team, as we progress from abstract principles to concrete design. Each meeting has a clear purpose and objective, includes a status update, and normally features a short presentation. We can meet at your offices or ours—we prefer a bit of both.
Miss out the middleman
Traditional agencies often treat account- and project-management staff as a buffer between clients and practitioners. We don’t. The web enables direct communication between team members—so that your query about typography is answered by the graphic designer, and you can discuss taxonomy with the information architect. If that sounds like email CC hell, relax—we use the awesome Basecamp service to organise all of our communications in a central repository.
Be ready for something to go wrong
The most meticulously planned projects can hit problems—and most web projects do. We add a healthy dollop of realism to our plans, methodologies and communications—we’re prepared for the reality that something won’t turn out as planned. Recognizing problems early can make the difference between a successful launch and a debacle—so we’re always ready to have another look at the scope, move a milestone, or call a face-to-face meeting when remote communications turn out not to be enough.
Joel Bobeck is a multi-discipline designer who specializes in creative thought and problem solving through art direction and graphic design for digital media.
