Working with Clients

Infor­ma­tion flow. It’s a prob­lem we expe­ri­ence every day, and all too often in this line of work. When infor­ma­tion flow is halted, it is as if you’ve jum­bled your index cards before a big pre­sen­ta­tion and now you don’t know exactly what you have to focus on to keep things mov­ing. The path to an effi­cient work­flow and timely com­ple­tion has expe­ri­enced a slight dis­con­nect. In this case, you have to fum­ble through your infor­ma­tion and pos­si­bly come off look­ing poorly to your client, which nobody ever wants to do.

So how can you man­age infor­ma­tion bet­ter? As a project begins, the infor­ma­tion flow is rea­son­able; you ask ques­tions and get answers to help you develop the project scope. Email is a great resource because you are given a dig­i­tal paper trail; how­ever, a lot of time can be spent on the phone gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion. How do you keep that por­tion straight? This is where I used to jot notes on scraps of paper and text files, but ended up get­ting the infor­ma­tion jum­bled at some point, which usu­ally left me with egg on my face.

When I started fol­low­ing the David Allen meth­ods of “Get­ting Things Done,” I real­ized that I had to start con­trol­ling my infor­ma­tion flow a whole lot bet­ter. Today, my meth­ods still uti­lize notes on paper and a few spread out files in a project folder; how­ever, after I have gath­ered some infor­ma­tion via phone or face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion, I sum up the infor­ma­tion and email it to the client. That gives them the oppor­tu­nity to tell me if I have a full under­stand­ing of what they’re look­ing to achieve. And, I have a con­cise trail that I can refer back to if I get stumped on a por­tion of the project (or if the client ques­tions the direc­tion). This has turned me from the “Absent Minded Devel­oper” to “Dr. Devel­op­ment” so to speak.

I have been focus­ing on web­site work lately will explain a good por­tion of my ini­tial infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing requests as seen by my clients. But I think this method can be tai­lored to meet any type of project needs.

PROJECT – WebsiteXYZ

SECTION:Home­page

• What you need this sec­tion to do
• Why you need this sec­tion to do that
• What you hope to accom­plish in this section

SECTION:Reg­is­ter

• What you need this sec­tion to do
• Why you need this sec­tion to do that
• And so on and so forth

I know, it’s dead sim­ple method­ol­ogy. The point is: I have found it to be quite suc­cess­ful when work­ing with new clients. When you ask, “What do you need me to do?” you leave the door wide open to a wealth of poten­tially unhelp­ful infor­ma­tion or even unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions. By ask­ing spe­cific ques­tions, track­ing answers and report­ing back to the client, you begin to man­age expec­ta­tions and cre­ate an open infor­ma­tion flow that pro­tects you both in the end. Cre­ate and fol­low a method for each project you get involved with. It will help your san­ity and effi­ciency ten fold.