Sustaining the Project Honeymoon Phase

Our client teams bring wild­ly dif­fer­ent lev­els of dig­i­tal exper­tise to a project. We often dive into a new project with a ton of mutu­al excite­ment, dri­ven by our vision for what this dig­i­tal mas­ter­piece can be. Over time, as we deliv­er con­tent, strat­e­gy, design, and dev deliv­er­ables, teams often start feel­ing frus­trat­ed with each oth­er and increas­ing­ly less sure of what’s been agreed upon. What feels clear at the begin­ning of the project starts feel­ing mud­di­er. Expec­ta­tions for scope, func­tion­al­i­ty, and design start diverg­ing. We hear from clients that they are con­fused about why they aren’t get­ting pix­el-per­fect comps for every screen in their project, or how they thought they would be able to change all the col­ors of the site on a whim.

Take a moment! Rather than vil­i­fy­ing a client for not ​‘get­ting it’ or for being bad­ly behaved, we as dig­i­tal project leads, should take a step back and exam­ine what we might have missed or failed to explain. Edu­cat­ing a client who has very lit­tle dig­i­tal exper­tise can feel daunt­ing, but there are sev­er­al basic edu­ca­tion prin­ci­ples we can deploy that will enable us to con­sis­tent­ly, quick­ly come up with sim­ple AND pow­er­ful edu­ca­tion­al assets for a client.