Five Days of Focus – Why Approval Doesn’t Matter
This is Day 2 of our Five Days of Focus 2021 – highlighting Project Management essentials.
This week has been all about the art of the perfect proposal, and we’re well on the way to developing the way you lay down the goods with your projects and clients.
As a quick refresher, let’s look at your biggest priorities for ensuring that you stay within budget, keep clients updated, and deliver finished products.
Your Three Process Priorities
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We’ve already gone hard on preventing bottlenecks and controlling scope creep, and we’ve discussed practical approaches and solutions for both of those issues. Today we’re getting into the thick of it with acceptance criteria.
Acceptance, approval, tomato, tomato—whatever you choose to call it, your main focus is making sure that your clients are understanding and agreeing to what you’re going to be giving them, in exchange for their money.
Do we want them to absolutely love their site when we hand it over? Yes, ideally. But we can’t afford to let a tricky customer lead us into an unfavorable situation that drags on forever. That’s why your acceptance process, and the criteria you present to the client (and agree on with them), should ensure that your client receives exactly what they asked for, no matter their mood this week.
Here are some important tips to keep in mind while crafting your acceptance process.
- Break the acceptance process down into parts.
Breaking the acceptance process down into stages and tangible, visible working parts is a benefit for both of you.
First, it allows you to satisfy your client’s curiosity by creating deliverables along the way. It opens up and facilitates communication, which is especially handy if you’re a little lax on giving updates. Most of all, it allows us to ensure that everyone is on the same page as the project goes along, versus going through an endless checklist on the final date of delivery.
By breaking down the acceptance process and agreeing to each aspect as it arises, you’re doing everything you can to mitigate nasty surprises. What’s more, it’s an accountability measure—if your client has already said yes to a detail earlier on in the process, they can’t go back and say that it’s wrong at the end. (Well, unless they’re willing to pay you to fix it.
- Prioritize functionality.
When structuring your acceptance process and breaking it down into small, manageable (read: digestible) parts, you inevitably need to decide what is most important for your client to approve—and for you to deliver.
That’s where functionality comes in.
It’s probably going to be the most detailed part of your acceptance process and the project in general, and that’s why it needs to be prioritized. Think about it: If you reach the end of your project and the client needs you to correct a color or image position, it’s going to take minimal time to fix. If it’s a missing plugin—well, enough of those, and you’re going to be put over the edge of your budget and your patience.
Above all else, your client needs a comprehensive, functioning site that contains and does everything you two have outlined. That means that functionality must always be at the front and center of everything you do. Don’t let it take second-fiddle to something that won’t cost you as much to correct.
- Get paid for nitpicky changes.
The irony of being a perfectionist is that nothing is ever truly perfect—and if your client is the same as you are, you’ll be burning through your budget and precious time with a million tiny adjustments.
This is why having an effective change management process is crucial—and directly related to your acceptance criteria. Your client has accepted the original criteria you’ve laid out. It’s your job to deliver to them exactly what you’ve agreed on,
Going the extra mile is a wonderful thing—but it can easily turn into a situation where you’re getting taken advantage of without realizing it. Stay strong, stay alert, and charge for your work that’s outside of the specified range of the acceptance process.
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