Managing Client Expectations, Part 3
Last time, we acknowledged the essential disconnect between the way most folks expect a webdev process to go, and the way it actually ends up going. Here are the components that cause this schism:
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Waterfall: How purchasing departments do things. In this straightforward, pragmatic worldview (held by most business people), they say, “Here’s what we want. Here’s the budget and the timeline. Make something.” But nearly limitless creative options and shifting priorities over the course of the project upend that approach almost immediately.
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AGILE: Iterate and optimize. This is how most creative people work. We try one thing, find it doesn’t work as well as we’d like, so we try something else based on what we’ve already learned. It’s probably the least efficient and cost-effective approach, but it’s consistently the one that creates the best results because it gets tested against reality the moment its results exist.
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Self-Awareness: If you're better at the Agile approach—and most creatives are—you’ll do well working in two-week sprints, then having the client review and request revisions on what you've done. Meanwhile, you’re building the first iteration of what started from the sitemap and wireframe.