office interior design scope of work
hey everybody, mike linvillehere from black dog education and thank you for coming by office hours today. now today'squestion was submitted via twitter and the question, i'm gonna paraphrase a little bitbecause you know it was the convoluted, at 140 characters at times it was a little bitof a conversation that was kind of going back and forth, but the gist of the question hadto do with communication between a web developer and ultimately yourself as the client. andyou know basically a long story short what ended up happening was you know there wasa miscommunication client got a bill for more than they thought everybody was upset andit just the communication breakdown just went and it went downhill from there and it didn'tend in a very pretty situation. i've been
doing web development for about 13 years i'veseen this happen a lot at times and any time those kind of breakdowns happen you can almostalways point back to a lack of communication that it wasn't clear you know the client hadin 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 marketingfor you, it could be anything right and if you think about it on the grand scale of thingscommunication breakdowns cause problems from a developer standpoint, so i want to talka little bit about scope documents and what a scope document is. a scope document is basicallya list of everything that's going to be taken care of in the project that you've got goingon, whether it's a development project, a
design project, whatever. so for example ifi'm going to engage a new customer to come to me to build a website fantastic. we'regoing to have some talks, some initial meetings and conversations about what they're lookingfor, 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 stuffdown and i need to know okay, i would build you this. it's going to be a 12 page websitehere are the pages it's going to include this much graphic design and include this thinghere this thing here. so you know what i've learned over the past however many years isthat scope documents are one of those situations where it takes a little more work up frontbut it is absolutely worth it and the reason
is if you have a solid scope document beforedoing any kind of work with a contractor there is no ambiguity, there's no arguments thereis no reason discussion really you know it's either in the paper or it's not this is whatyou told me that this project was going to cost and and this is what you told me youwere going to give me. i can tell you right now i have zero issues, not get me wrong ihave issues, but i don't have any issues around that anymore because i've learned. i investthe time sure from a developers perspective it does take a couple more hours up frontyou know especially on smaller projects it is kind of hard to do because if there's nota lot of project management time associated with it then you know you've got some issuesthere but from a developer that's something
that i do because i know that they make myjob a lot easier from a business owner's perspective do this if your developer isn't going to doit absolutely you should do is make sure that you understand before you sign any contractsexactly what you're paying, exactly how it will be delivered, and you know what kindof recourse if you're not happy with what's going on. make sure that you're aware of allthat stuff so that you know when the end of the project comes and they try to hand youa bill or your contractor tries to give you a bill for something you can be like, no yousaid you'd take care of that right here, section 2 subsection 3. totally going to be worthit and it will save tons of time and a lot of money and a lot of heart ache and all thatother stuff. so again mike linville from office
hours i appreciate you kind of letting meriff on that for a little bit. if you have questions about this or about any other thingyou'd like to see us address on office hours please make sure to send us an e-mail officehours@blackdogeducation.comyou can also post them up on our facebook wall or you can send them over to us on twitter@blackdogedu. and i'm going to ask you a favor if you'll let me. we need some feedback. wewant to know, are these videos helping, are they hurting, are we answering your questionsin a timely fashion, whatever the case is. if you could do me a favor and take a coupleseconds and put a comment down below this box that let's us know if we are on track,what we can do better, because ultimately we want to serve you better, we want to helpout as much as we can. if we're spinning our
tires lets us know, we'll mix up the format,if we're doing a great job let us know what we can do to make them even better and we'llget those things turned around for you. again this is mike linville from black dog education,have a great day. }