Quick tips to avoid cost overruns

Managing your web project and related budget can be a challenge. So we thought we’d share a few simple yet effective tips to help you keep your web project on track.

Avoid big committees
Outside of jury duty, I don’t know where else these are genuinely useful, but they can be devastating to a website project budget. Long meetings combined with a dominant voice with little to say make it difficult for important information to be extracted to form any sort of web strategy.  If committees can’t be avoided, try to select one point of contact that interfaces with the agency, while bringing in committees during the early discovery phase and for major presentations.

Be committed
Understand that this is a team project and you are a part of it. Don’t be surprised if managing the website project is a full time position (or more).

Trust the team you hired
If you find yourself researching solutions or micro-managing the process, it’s probably because you don’t trust the agency or team you’ve hired. Do your due diligence to find a team that you trust in order to avoid second guessing during the project. Understand that your agency should be experienced in this sort of project and they might be suggesting solutions that will help to avoid cost overruns in the future.

Client experience matters
Having someone on your end who understands web development—or has experience on a previous redesign—will keep the project closer to budget. The more you can hit the ground running, the less time is spent on explaining and training. Rarely will an agency budget an exorbitant amount for hand-holding during a project, so these costs (i.e. additional meetings) usually come at the client’s surprise.

Rushed deadlines and last minute updates
Rushing a deadline for any reason will usually result in cost overruns. Whether from premium rates or pulling new people onto the project, you will have to evaluate the marginal benefit of a quick turnaround as opposed to working out a more realistic deadline. Last minute updates should also be avoided as much as possible. Even a seemingly innocuous change can require additional documentation, programming changes, and quality assurance checks that could be avoided if known in advance.

Details, details, details
The more details at the beginning of the project—even in the discovery stage—the better. Though many project details are preconceived before picking a vendor, most agencies will agree that being part of the initial planning stages and assisting with overall strategic planning and visioning results in a stronger end result.

Be an organized client
This is a simple piece of advice, but seems to always happen. From easily overlooked protocols like inconsistent labelling of files and lazy folder structures when submitting content, to arriving late for meetings, disorganization can turn the project into a puzzle.

Focus on doing a few things right
Scope creep is inevitable, so keeping it to a minimum should be your goal. It’s common that once the ball gets rolling, the client suddenly ‘gets it’ and new features are suggested late in the game. Ask yourself, ‘is it a deal breaker if we launch without this feature?’ Understand that there is life after the launch, so don’t be afraid to plan for and release new features later on.

Save up your changes
Good things come in bunches. That holds true for changes. If you can, save up your changes or updates and send them to your agency all at once. Sending a series of changes (and changes to your changes) in a combination of phone calls, meetings and emails results in reduced efficiency, and increases the chance that something could be missed, or that one change will unexpectedly effect another.

Keep the flow
Long breaks between approvals hurt the momentum. When projects restart after dormancy, it takes a while to get everyone back to working as well-oiled as before, which generally leads to things taking longer.  Your agency team may need to reacquaint themselves with the documentation on your project, review old code or design work to get their groove back, or may even be tied up with something else if the delay was unexpectedly long.

Understand what you’re in for
This isn’t so much a tip as a mindset you need to be in when starting a web project. Developing a website is an IT-style project, following much the same workflow process.  And while the IT manager mantra of ‘it’s going to cost four times as much and take four times as long as anticipated’ might not hold true for most web projects, it’s important to understand how quickly the entire process can unravel when the client and agency don’t have a consistent vision, clear strategy, and an understanding of what causes cost overruns.