Not a good way to be spending your time hours before the clocks chimed in the New Year.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take a step back.<\/p>\n
How did I end up in this situation, and why wasn\u2019t I chilling in a beach bar sipping on a Ti\u2019 Punch while waiting for the Champagne to cool?<\/p>\n
The truth is, I hadn\u2019t put in the project management systems in place that would have prevented this situation.<\/p>\n
I work at Planio<\/a>, a project management tool, and I\u2019ve talked to lots of WordPress developers on how they manage client projects using it.<\/p>\n Based on what I\u2019ve learned from them, I made some critical mistakes that put me right in this unenviable position.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s count down through them.<\/p>\n Originally, this project was a simple blog.<\/p>\n No big deal. I was a WordPress newbie, but I was sure that this project wouldn\u2019t be a problem.<\/p>\n Then, a few weeks later the client casually suggested that the blog should be in two different languages.<\/p>\n I did a little research. I found a few plugins that seemed to do the job handily. So, I emailed him back enthusiastically, saying that it would be no problem.<\/p>\n During the first design review, he suggested that we consider a mind map for the homepage as a form of navigation on the site.<\/p>\n Mind maps for navigating a site was a terrible idea then. It\u2019s still a terrible idea now.<\/p>\n But, always eager to get my teeth into something new, I added the job of figuring out how to build the mind map with CSS and javascript to my growing to-do list.<\/p>\n Scope creep had hit me with a vengeance.<\/em><\/p>\n And because I\u2019d agreed to these changes in emails and conversations, I didn\u2019t have a documented list of the changes to the project. I couldn\u2019t show the amount of time these changes added to the project. And I wasn\u2019t able to demonstrate the increases in cost they represented.<\/p>\n All I had was more work to do with the same deadline.<\/p>\n Remember how I agreed to add another language to the site?<\/p>\n Well, it turned out that the client wasn\u2019t great at translation, himself.<\/p>\n And it wasn\u2019t something I was able to do, either.<\/p>\n But he did have a friend who was really great at French, so she was enlisted as the translator for the website copy.<\/p>\n And now I had to make sure that the client finished the website copy ahead of time, so I could get it to the translator to allow enough time for translation along with the usual back-and-forth.<\/p>\n I\u2019d just graduated to a linguistically-challenged project manager. And I wasn\u2019t very good at it.<\/p>\n The client felt that he just needed a few more days to get the copy perfect as we were pushing up towards Christmas.<\/p>\nMistake #1: Casually Agreeing to Increases in Scope<\/h3>\n
Mistake #2: Allowing Delays on the Client\u2019s Side<\/h3>\n