My Latest Smashing Magazine Article: Digital Project Productivity

My latest article for Smashing Magazine was published today, Guidelines for Successful Communication With Clients. For those of us who’ve been working in this industry for a few years now know all too well, winning new work is merely the start of the challenge – completing a digital project on budget and on time are some of the next ones, and with clients in the mix, this isn’t always as easy as it could be.

I start this article describing a scenario I bet we all recognise…

A screenshot of my latest Smashing Magazine article
Your mission: Spot the movie references inside the article :)

A common scenario

Most of us have been there – we’re working on a project for a client, we plan it, we set down a timeline with milestones and everyone is happy. We then complete our first task that requires feedback and wait for the response on the date mutually agreed, one that would keep the project on schedule… then it happens, the response doesn’t come or it does and it in no way helps the project along…

It makes you want to go and hibernate for a few months in a warm safe place and put the client into carbon freeze.

Go on, read my article, fool

Other topics I discuss in the article are:

  • Regular Schedule and Budget Updates
  • The Client Is a Project Team Member
  • Shifts in Schedule Isn’t Always Bad
  • Help the Client Out, Be Pro-active
  • Get Real, Get Commercial
  • Dealing with Multiple Stakeholders
  • Identify the Client-side Project Manager
  • Make Your Primary Contact Look Good
  • Face-to-Face Sessions and Meetings
  • It’s Not Always the Client that’s the Bottleneck!
A full size Lego model of the Carbon Freeze storage pod Han Solo was kept, with a hole where the head should go, in during the Star Wars movie series
Sometimes you just want to put someone into carbon freeze

Guidelines for Successful Communication With Clients »

Let me know what you think of the article, or what you topics you’d like me to write about next.