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Hey everybody, Mike Linville here from Black Dog Education and thank you
for coming by Office Hours today. Now today's question was submitted via twitter and the
question, I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit because you know it was the convoluted, at
140 characters at times it was a little bit of a conversation that was kind of going back
and forth, but the gist of the question had to do with communication between a web developer
and ultimately yourself as the client. And you know basically a long story short what
ended up happening was you know there was a miscommunication client got a bill for more
than they thought everybody was upset and it just the communication breakdown just went
and it went downhill from there and it didn't end in a very pretty situation. I've been
doing web development for about 13 years I've seen this happen a lot at times and any time
those kind of breakdowns happen you can almost always point back to a lack of communication
that it wasn't clear you know the client had in their mind one thing the developer had
in their mind another. And when I say developer, it can be a developer it could be a designer
it could be somebody doing Internet marketing for you, it could be anything right and if
you think about it on the grand scale of things communication breakdowns cause problems from
a developer standpoint, so I want to talk a little bit about scope documents and what
a scope document is. A scope document is basically a list of everything that's going to be taken
care of in the project that you've got going on, whether it's a development project, a
design project, whatever. So for example if I'm going to engage a new customer to come
to me to build a website fantastic. We're going to have some talks, some initial meetings
and conversations about what they're looking for, how it's going to look, what it's going
to include what it's not going to include. And then in order for me to be able to provide
a person with an estimate, I write this stuff down and I need to know okay, I would build
you this. It's going to be a 12 page website here are the pages it's going to include this
much graphic design and include this thing here this thing here. So you know what I've
learned over the past however many years is that scope documents are one of those situations
where it takes a little more work up front but it is absolutely worth it and the reason
is if you have a solid scope document before doing any kind of work with a contractor there
is no ambiguity, there's no arguments there is no reason discussion really you know it's
either in the paper or it's not this is what you told me that this project was going to
cost and and this is what you told me you were going to give me. I can tell you right
now I have zero issues, not get me wrong I have issues, but I don't have any issues around
that anymore because I've learned. I invest the time sure from a developers perspective
it does take a couple more hours up front you know especially on smaller projects it
is kind of hard to do because if there's not a lot of project management time associated
with it then you know you've got some issues there but from a developer that's something
that I do because I know that they make my job a lot easier from a business owner's perspective
do this if your developer isn't going to do it absolutely you should do is make sure that
you understand before you sign any contracts exactly what you're paying, exactly how it
will be delivered, and you know what kind of recourse if you're not happy with what's
going on. Make sure that you're aware of all that stuff so that you know when the end of
the project comes and they try to hand you a bill or your contractor tries to give you
a bill for something you can be like, no you said you'd take care of that right here, section
2 subsection 3. Totally going to be worth it and it will save tons of time and a lot
of money and a lot of heart ache and all that other stuff. So again Mike Linville from Office
Hours I appreciate you kind of letting me riff on that for a little bit. If you have
questions about this or about any other thing you'd like to see us address on Office Hours
please make sure to send us an e-mail officehours@blackdogeducation.com you can also post them up on our Facebook
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this is Mike Linville from Black Dog Education, have a great day. }