ChangeOrder

How to Handle Change Requests

Tape this to your monitor:

"We'll be more than happy to make the changes that you've noted to this most recent round of [name of deliverable]. However, to accommodate your request, there will be an impact on the project schedule and overall scope, which may result in a change order. We'll get back to you within [X number of hours] with an idea of what kind of impact, if any, these changes may have."

Painting a clear picture of what deliverables and edits are included as part of your overall service offering, and then being just as clear about what client-desired changes are outside the boundary of that offering, are a fundamental attribute of running any service-oriented business.

Join Me for AIGA Seattle's "Design Business for Breakfast"

Whether you’re a freelancer, an in-house designer, or working at an agency or studio, you can never know too much about the business side of design. And in today’s tough economy, you need that business edge even more.

In "Design Business for Breakfast," a three-part series presented by AIGA Seattle, David Sherwin of frog design will host professionals from the Seattle design community—each of whom has deep experience in client service, project management, and design studio management. David and his co-presenters will give you a fresh perspective on professional practices and provide you with tips and tools that you can start using right away.

Each month's event will take place at Il Fornaio, Pacific Place, 600 Pine Street, Seattle.

 

Connect With Your Clients
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 | 7:30 - 9 a.m.
How to develop and sustain strong relationships with clients, whether you manage them directly or work through an account manager. Led by Erica Goldsmith, former Account Director at both Hornall Anderson Design Works and Cole and Weber United, and Executive Producer at Worktank.

Registration
Single Event | includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials
AIGA Members: $25 | Register
Nonmembers: $35 | Register

 

Structure Your Projects and Process
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 | 7:30 - 9 a.m.
Heighten your project management skills and build stable business processes that support your creative work. Led by Fiona Robertson Remley, who has built processes and managed projects at many Seattle agencies and corporations, including Worktank, Big Fish Games, Martini Design, Methodologie, Nordstrom, and Microsoft.

Registration
Structure Your Projects and Processes | includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials
AIGA Members: $25 | Register
Nonmembers: $35 | Register

 

Follow the Green
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | 7:30 - 9 a.m.
Learn how design businesses make money: follow a designer’s earned income for a project, for a month, and over the course of an entire working year. Aimed at working designers and agency professionals. Led by David Conrad, Partner/Studio Director of Design Commission, an interactive design agency in Pioneer Square.

Registration
Follow the Green | includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials
AIGA Members: $25 | Register
Nonmembers: $35 | Register (link coming soon)

 

Full Breakfast Series | all three events
Connect With Your Clients (1/13)
Structure Your Projects and Process (2/10)
and Follow the Green (3/10)

includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials

AIGA Members: $60 | Register
Nonmembers: $90 | Register

Overpromise and Underdeliver

If you want to break a client's heart, sell what you don't know how to produce. Bill your client the time necessary to learn the tools you need to make them happy. Wow them with your big thinking and static comps, but be coy about how your ideas can be realized in the appropriate delivery technology.

The Fourth No

One of the risks in creating comprehensive brand experience frameworks, replete with scripted behaviors that employees must follow dutifully down to the letter, is that it can make a mockery of conventional human activities.

Take my shopping visit over lunch to Borders, which is a few blocks closer than Barnes & Noble—a critical decision factor when the rain is pelting down in its characteristic Seattle fashion. Walking through the front door, I paused to peruse the new Eoin Colfer entry into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy canon. Scanning through the preface, I was interrupted by a headset-wearing young woman.

"Need any assistance?"

"No, thank you," I demurred, glancing briefly through the tome before wandering deeper into the wilds of Fiction & Literature. As I strolled along the stacks, the book spines flicking past in reverse alphabetical order, I was stopped by another Borders employee.

"Looking for something?"

"No, just browsing, thanks," I said. I didn't want to let her know the title of the book I was seeking—Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness—so I wouldn't be sucked into dialogue regarding cross-listing of books within various departments, opportunities for special orders that may be delivered to the shop, and an infinitude of other actions that could emerge from that simple request for help. She can tell that I am hedging my true intent, as most customers do, and swiftly moves along to Westerns.

I arrived at the B's. They only had copies of de Botton's On Love and How Proust Can Change Your Life. I took the former book from the top shelf and began to read the first chapter.

"Finding what you're looking for?" I turned to see another Borders employee, kindly smiling up at me as my mind froze mid-sentence.

"You bet, no problem," I said. She continued about her business. I continued to read about transatlantic flights, the probabilities inherent in meeting your true love, and a host of other topics. After glancing at a few other volumes on the shelf, I started to walk out—only to be confronted by yet another staffer.

"Need any help?" he said.

What I wanted to say: "I do need help. I need you to seriously rethink what customer service looks like in a bookstore."

Instead what came out was a final, cavernous "No." This was the last word I emitted before leaving.

Remembering to Say Thank You

It's not just what you say—it's how you say it. This maxim could not apply more to sending thank you notes to those people who've supported you most: short- or long-term clients, vendors, colleagues, friends, and family. And as designers, we're quite well equipped to trump the usual off-the-shelf rote cards and send out simple, elegant cards that transcend the Hallmarks of the world. Clients don't just remember the results you've provided. They always remember that you thanked them for the opportunity to do the great work. And while you shouldn't expect anything discrete back from a thank you besides appreciation… often great things will happen as a result that you couldn't have anticipated.

Strolling to Conclusions

Roads lead to alleys. Alleys lead to dead ends. And you can't see them all before you've entered into a client engagement—no matter how much of a "design expert" you say you are.

"I've done a ton of logos, so this project is a cinch for me. In the client meeting, I'll share with them some design themes I've been exploring when drawing up my estimate. Just some riffing, really... nothing too serious that I can't back out of when the paperwork is finalized... It'll just help me cinch the gig."

What a bad habit. Sure, we get excited about the possibility of a new project and start sharing initial impressions that come to mind. But sharing your opinion like that—off the cuff—can be very damaging for the project you're looking to start, your long-term relationship, and the design profession in general. It belies an assumption that you are more important than the gazillions of people out there that form the basis of your client's design problem.

Let me provide a few examples.

Design Business in a Nutshell

Almost two years ago, I wrote these notes to myself—so that I wouldn't forget these key lessons I'd learned about working in the design business.

Sustainability on the Compost Pile

Two caterpillars, three baby slugs, and a spider. That's what I discovered when I was washing my broccoli from the farmer's market.

I'm a big proponent for supporting my local farms. But for a city slicker like myself, raised in the suburbs and weaned on sparkling clean Costco-sized produce, the brand experience I'm having with eating local produce is taking me straight back to nature—and in a way that makes me a little queasy.

Until about four years ago, my process of eating fruits and vegetables had been managed by large factories bent on quality assurance and pallet-perfect stacks of nectarines. As a result, the inherent waste in the activity was disguised from moi, the consumer.

Now, a little bit of the factory is me. And really, that's how it should be. If I was a farmer born in the 1860s, things would be a hell of a lot harder in this regard: I would be growing these fresh strawberries, weeding them, watering them, killing any major pests or bugs, crouching down on my knees to pluck their sweet fruit off the bushes—thereby dirtying my knees.

A whole world of physical labor has now been replaced by reading "1 pint 4–" off a chalkboard, peeling cash out of my wallet, carrying the carton home, turning out the berries into a colander, and picking out of the bunch the five or six berries consumed by rot or sporting a happy little worm. Really, I need to get over my squeamish stomach (and my allergy to spider bites... whenever I find a spider in my produce, I'm apt to throw him into the compost bin instead of carrying the poor arachnid outside, where he's likely to get chomped instantly by the birds that live around our apartment.)

Just as the process of buying a bag with three pristine red peppers plays into our notions of packaged food perfection—and disguises the waste inherent in the plant-to-store manufacturing process—what in our genetic makeup causes us to reach for the unblemished fruit instead of the peach sporting a black eye?

The problem, really, is our notion of short-term value overtaking the impact of our long-term actions. And this is made manifest through our notion of waste.

How to Mitigate Major Project Errors, Pt. 3 of 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this piece.

 

How to Mitigate Major Project Errors, Pt. 2 of 3

Read Part 1 of this piece.

How to Mitigate Major Project Errors, Pt. 1 of 3

Refreshed by your first eight hours of sleep in what feels like a decade, you stroll into your office, only to be stopped cold by the message light blinking on your voicemail.

It's your client, with a three-minute description of how their new shopping cart system—which you'd been slaving over for months, and finally deployed late last night—has been balking while trying to process credit card purchases. For hours. To the tune of many thousands of dollars lost in sales.

How will you resolve this issue, and how are you going to communicate a plan of action to your client?

Where we most often fail in the client management process is when, after all that work, errors still slip through—and we can't formally explain to our clients how we'll resolve them to their benefit.

Depending on the scale of your client's business, an error in project implementation could have a major fiscal impact—not to mention the drag on your long-term customer experience. Errors like the ones I noted above happen more often than we would care to admit. Most web designers understand the value of testing protocols, debugging code, and stabilizing a build in order to deploy a website or web app. But it's how we manage the errors that slip through while testing, printing, or fulfilling your design work that forges project success. Dealing with project errors in a professional manner is what defines the longevity of designer-client relationships.

Here's a quick primer on how to maintain your professionalism and protect the integrity of your client relationships when resolving these kinds of major project errors.

Review of "The Designful Company"

“If you wanna innovate, you gotta design.” —Marty Neumeier

From the airy confines of interior design to the tailored minutae of the type designer, the varied disciplines of our profession continue to rush outwards like galaxies fleeing the Big Bang. And the force that drives our profession’s expansion? The universal process we call design.

As designers, we have lived and breathed this process often enough to embody its power, in whatever domain we choose. For a businessperson, however, design is nebulous. A slippery fish. When placed on a slide under the accountant’s microscope, design can perish—even in the most progressive corporate culture. And without design, there is no innovation.

But do not fear. To the rescue is Marty Neumeier, with The Designful Company. Much like Mr. Neumeier’s other bestsellers, The Brand Gap and Zag, his new whiteboard overview is set to completely reinvigorate how our profession engages executives in the boardroom. Finally, we have a shared vocabulary that marries aesthetics to business—and from a book with such simplicity, elegance, and verve, it’s downright humbling...

Read my full review of The Designful Company on The Designer's Review of Books.

Unsolving the Business Problem

To get to point B, first you need to figure out how you arrived at point A.

Take the following example: You've been asked to lead a half-year marketing project for an international cruise line. They're launching a new luxury cruise liner that serves the Caribbean via Miami. Your new client wants you to help her sell out a full season on the new boat. They have a ton of ideas to share with you on how they can accomplish their goals.

Sitting down for your first meeting—an information-gathering session at corporate headquarters—your responsibility is to determine the scope of the campaign and help brainstorm tactics. After the meeting, you'll write a creative brief and prepare to kick off the project with your design team.

After a few minutes of small talk, your client starts to rattle off the details. Three new ports of call. An Olympic-sized swimming pool on the top deck. A new five-star dining menu with a first-rate wine list. Right away, the design ideas start flowing fast and furious in your mind. In the margin of your notebook, you start a few initial sketches that you just know will sell out all the luxury berths through the entire winter season. Suddenly, you blurt out: "Send the travel agents coconuts!"

Not five minutes had elapsed in your information-gathering session, and you've gone right to work. Such scenarios, where you have a clear vision of design solutions to marry up with a stated marketing goal, often seem serendipitous. But the habit of engaging in design ideation before having a thorough understanding of your client's business context is a bad one that should be broken. I'm not denying the value of intuition in the design process, but rather seeking that we employ our intuition after we have created a strategy by which to focus it.

Which leads to the crux of this scenario. A critical skill for any client-facing designer is the ability to scape away at the surface of a marketing problem to thoroughly understand its business context. Marketing is not business. Marketing is an activity that supports doing business. If you don't have a business context for a marketing project—i.e, understanding what business decisions led to engaging a designer's services to participate in sales and marketing activity—then talking strategy and marketing tactics can be somewhat ungrounded.

So, when situations such as these emerge during a client engagement, I immediately try to "unsolve the business problem." This is the act of shifting a client's conversational focus from the stated marketing problem to the underlying system of business conditions that led to its formation. By understanding the system of challenges in which your client's stated problem stands, you can better serve your client in forging a more strategic, better-designed result.

What follows are eight critical questions you can ask your clients—and glean insight into the business context around their marketing problems.

Always Try to Diversify

A long time ago, I worked at a firm that had a major telecommunications client. Over 50% of our monthly billings were derived from creating logos and names for new product launches, helping to brainstorm print ads and direct mailers, and otherwise serving as a creative sounding board. There was no retainer agreement, only projects that were opened with a rough time estimate and hourly rate.

It was creative nirvana. You could spend as little or as much time as you wanted on a project, as long as you had a range of thinking in your comps. Our clients trusted us, and we trusted them.

My wife and I had been discussing moving to Seattle for some time, and the final decision to make the move was very difficult -- mainly because this firm was such a great place to work. I gave my notice, my wife and I packed up our place and hopped in our car for a month-long cross-country jaunt. One morning in Chicago, while staying at a family member's place, I saw in the paper that my client's company had misstated earnings across all of their financial statements and was going to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Client goes poof, at least in the short- to mid-term. My former job vanished as well; they never rehired for the position. There's no way our clients in marketing or my boss could have ever known that would happen... and the client never recovered.

It's easy to be optimistic about what you can control in your designer/client relationship. You can make your clients happy and keep the bucks rolling in. But you can't control their business decisions beyond what you design and the observed impact of your designs in the world.

You can inform them and provide insight. You can educate them regarding what their options are strategically and tactically. You can even be Chief Design Officer and sit at the big polished mahogany table powering up your big presentation on how you'll optimize their customer experience and rethink their brand and make amazing new products that will bring in billions.

But you aren't the CEO. You aren't the Chairman of the Board. You control your domain, and unless you're the honcho who's dealing with the shareholders and making the tough decisions on critical business issues, you're SOL.

This is why you need to diversify.

And it isn't just about money. There are many sound reasons to pursue a more diverse client base, starting now...

Four Common-Sense Clauses for Design Contracts

It's incredible how a single sentence in your contract can throw a total wrench into an otherwise simple mid-project negotiation.

I'm no contracts lawyer, but after living through a good number of stumbles, I've started to mandate a few critical contract terms in my client agreements. If you're looking to be professional and be clear about IP ownership in the midst of a mid- to long-term design engagement, you should see if you include these kinds of terms in your standard design contract.*

How to Conduct Post-Future Project Evaluations

The website finally went live last week, and the entire staff is throwing a party to celebrate! The developers are huddled in the corner with some microbrews, plotting how they'll splice into the agency intranet to add in a virtual dartboard. Designers are mingling with the copywriters and account people, clinking wineglasses and bonding over the ads they saw during The Office--did you see that amazing CG work, where the car dissolved into a field of flowers?

Not the best time to mention that tomorrow, you're scheduling a post-future meeting (nee post-mortem) to talk about how the project really went.

Yes, the job went way over budget — and the last thing they want to think about is who needs to take responsibility for it. Was the estimate wrong to begin with? Did the designer spend too long tweaking those page comps? How come the developer pulled so many late nights, when he said he knew .NET? Besides, they'll still be nursing their hangovers. If you're the one in charge, you get to take responsibility for the result.

Or do you?

Discovering how a creative agency fails to make profit on a project usually boils down to a series of in-process decisions that, while intended to be good, lead to cost overruns and errors. Isolating and clarifying those agency decisions role by role can be painful and time-consuming if done incorrectly -- but if carried out in the right manner and in a group setting, a post-future meeting can galvanize a team and bring them closer together. By being aware of how they've behaved in the past, they'll be able to see repeated patterns and anticipate ways to stop them from happening again.

A post-future meeting affords more than just saying, "Well, next time we'll do it better." It can give your staff real visibility into how everyone's jobs are interrelated. Those dependencies are what cause true profit on a creative task. Agency professionals get budgets and hourly estimates of what it'll take to do a creative task, but those estimates can be severely influenced by staff interaction. Day-to-day miscommunications may seem like they're out of managerial control, but they aren't. Fostering dialogue and collaboration is what truly makes profit possible, especially on large, multi-phase projects that continue over a series of months.

Even if you're a solo-flight designer, answering the following questions after completing a big project will help you take a dispassionate look at how you're doing business.

The Eight Archetypes of Account Managers

Hello, fine friend. I adore you.

While I am in the midst of brainstorming the campaign, you are having Conversation #34 with the client about how they need to pony up the big bucks for the media buy. Or when I'm having a stakeholder interview with the ornery CEO, you are dutifully distilling our conversation into intelligent soundbites that easily weave into the user experience brief.

Can I imagine life without my trusty partner in (non)crime, the account manager?

Well, yeah. It would suck a whole lot more.

After working with a range of account managers across all sorts of industries, I've started to discern the roles that undergird the business side of our beloved design industry. And much like the various archetypes of art directors you may have met during your own journey through the designopolis, you may have enjoyed the company of these fine account management types that make our work more liveable:

Your Strategy is Showing

Breathtaking.

That's the feeling you get when you see a designed artifact out in the market, whether logo or advertisement or Web site, and you can see right through it to the marketing strategy.

Why would your company put your marketing strategy into plain view?

Starting a Disloyalty Program

I received my dividend check in the mail today from REI -- just as I was retiring my rock climbing harness. Talk about fortuitous circumstances. Right place, right time, right amount of free money to make the trip downtown worthwhile. It's like they knew exactly what I needed.

Then I walked into the store. There must have been hundreds upon hundreds of people just like me. The place was packed full of outdoorsy and not-so-granola types with their arms full of all those little things they'd been waiting until now to purchase. I almost balked at the very long line to check out, but it moved quickly. The woman at the checkout, Raven, thanked me for coming in and for being patient.

This scene was today. March 7, 2009. And it was only made possible because they'd sent me a check and held a sale.

When I got home, I read through the REI year-end report. Their earnings dropped from over $40 million dollars in 2007 to a bit over $14 million in 2008. That kind of shortfall is insane.

There are a large number of publicly-traded and private companies that are boldly suffering in the midst of structuring their businesses on extremely volatile business assumptions and premises. We're being told day after day and shown just how bad things really are. Perhaps your company or design firm has needed to lay off employees to gird themselves for potential failure.

As a result, we need to be honest with ourselves and our clients. We should be telling our clients what we can do to help them beyond fulfilling stopgap, immediate needs. It's time to stop being reactive and start being proactive through the downturn.

How can you start being proactive?

You're going to need to be a little disloyal when it comes to "business as usual" thinking around design business. You're going to have to spend less time worrying about business as usual and more time being present with your clients as people.

A lot of what I'll be talking about in this post is fairly self-evident. But in the midst of so much sturm und drang, it's worthwhile to remind ourselves of some of the fundamental ideas about working relationships that undergird our profession from a business perspective.

Not Good Proposals. Great Proposals.

With titanic battles happening nowadays over new business, it's crucial that you craft great proposals to win life-sustaining projects.

Not good. Great.

In the past, I've worked at agencies where proposal writing consisted of creating a laundry list: one final logo in the necessary formats, two rounds of client revisions, and so on. That worked fine when the money was flowing. Nowadays, the cost of entry is higher. Clients look at the deliverables, the price, and then start to haggle without mercy. Maybe that worked a few years ago. Not so much now. If you're bidding on a serious project for a new client, you need something a bit more... thorough. Be prepared to ante up with a great proposal.

Here's what to keep in mind when you write it.