Tuesday, January 1, 2008, 10:04pm
Working Through a Delay
As a freelancer, sometimes you’ll have clients that don’t work on the same schedule as you. In fact, sometimes you’ll feel as if there is a 1-2 week time zone difference, which would be the only way to explain the long gaps in response to your emails. Yes, it can get very frustrating, especially if your own work timelines rely heavily on others getting back to you on time. However, here are two things you can do to help with project delays.
Pick up the phone.
Clients generally can avoid email for quite some time, but voicemails pile up fast and make for an annoying wait. Although you are in IT and many of the people you communicate with are also in IT, not everyone else outside the industry responds to email via their BlackBerry. A phone call is almost always a better way to discuss an issue anyway, so remember to pick up the phone more often than hitting the send button.
Modularize your tasks (and your code).
Not every question you have for your client is a complete showstopper. Most of the time, your client is looking for you to make the tougher decisions and to go with your own gut on things. In fact, my experience in small business clients has told me that many owners don’t want much to do with the website at all except during the initial planning phase.
Therefore, the best way to work through delays is to component-ize your design and avoid the showstopper. For example, I had a question for a recent client regarding the process through which an order is fulfilled and shipped from the warehouse to the customer. Because the entire project was relatively large, I implemented a modular system in which plug-ins did most of the heavy lifting. Then I implemented both the shipping and stocking modules as plug-ins to the main framework, which allowed me to work through much of the downtime while I waited for answers.
Of course, I won’t always be so lucky and neither will you, but once you start thinking about projects as groups of smaller tasks, you’ll start to see increased productivity and, ultimately, a better product.
