24 October 2006
In 1996 I had a number of passionate debates (we won't call them fights) with a distinguished corporate lawyer. As employees of IBM we were supposedly on the same team... in reality it was war.My job was to design and deliver a massive pan-European web development for a major international client... his job was to make sure I didn't screw it up expose IBM legally.
Thinking back it is easy to imagine what he thought of me; too young, too scruffy and far too beardy for my own good... yet inexplicably in charge of a project worth hundred's of thousands of pounds. I won't say what I thought of him.
We fought pretty much from the first moment we met, and to illustrate why you might want to try the following thought experiment.
1) Close your eyes and imagine the home page your favourite web site.
2) Create a mental description of the home page that would allow a designer who has never seen the site to re-create it exactly.
Hard isn't it.
But that is exactly what my colleague wanted... a proposal so specific that it could be defended legally. He did my head in... and on several occasions I was in danger of throwing all the toys out of my pram.
In my career I have written proposals for hundreds of projects in many different situations. I have made proposal by formal tenders, by brief emails, and in one memorable case managed to secure a £30,000 contract on the basis of a three minute phone call. But never once in all that time have I ever 'known' exactly what a Client would end up with. Not in a way that would have made my friend at IBM happy.
And this is why. Things change all the time in web development. Like any creative project the thing is alive... it's constantly evolving. Weak ideas are abandoned or reworked. Good ideas are replaced with great ideas. Or perhaps you come up against unexpected obstacles and have to route around them. The content that the Client promised last month is suddenly canned... think again, think again. Things happen during a project and the finished result is always different from what was proposed.
And here's the thing... it almost always turns out better than I planned.
I've written five proposals in the last four weeks, but in none of them have I specified exactly what the Client will get. I have tried to give enough detail to be credible, but leave enough room for the wiggling that is always (always) necessary.
At the time of writing we've won four, and the fifth is looking pretty likely. So I guess we are doing okay for now.
But I'd like to say sorry to my colleague at IBM. In many ways he was right. It was not unreasonable for our Client to want to know what they were buying for their hundreds of thousands...
...the problem was that I just didn't know what they'd be getting. Ten years and numerous projects later I still don't. That's why things are still fun!
Posted by Nick Warren at 8:12 AM
