I’m just finishing up Web work on a symposium that illustrates all that’s wrong with unplanned development: the people in charge kept coming up with new ideas after we’d started, and they kinda liked waiting until work was done on something before starting to think about it. So I (and others) would work to on a Web page or some other technology, which would get the symposium organizers thinking. Not only would they change much of what was done, but they’d expand the project as well. And they had this habit of sliding new requirements into various casual discussions, almost as if we’d been talking about it all along. If you’ve been in this business very long, you know this happens more often than not — there’s even a term for it (“scope creep”). I don’t bill for my time here, but if I did, the symposium organizer would have been spanked with a fat bill.
Incomplete planning costs more in the long run. Both sides need to view the beginning of a project as a critical partnership, and both need to ask a lot of questions and listen carefully to the answers. Remember that the other side speaks a different language than you do, so you might have to rephrase.
Developers blame it on the clients (“just tell me what you want and stick to it”), but in many cases the client doesn’t know enough about the technology or best practices to even start. So they need something to react to — but a fully-developed site takes too much effort and requires too many business and process assumptions to be effective or economical as a brainstorming session. And most developers I know are get-it-done types: they’ll suffer through a meeting or two, but they’ll be itching to get started.
It’s important to remember that there are many disincentives to effective planning, and that you might have to be aggressive in order to preserve it in the process.
In this case, the symposium organizers were ecstatic with the results we achieved. Of course, I was not so pleased. We had to explain, politely but firmly, how badly the process was broken. They’ll be back, and next time the expectations will be higher.
