Subtle Hint From Client -- Work Faster!

I just got a chat from a client today, on a Sunday of all things. Chat sucks. I hate chat because sometimes you get undesirables, and clients reaching you at times when you're mega-tired. I really only like using it to talk to a business associate, and only one or two of them because more than that it gets hairy to manage and sucks valuable time. I've got one person (non-client) named Steve who is always depressed and miserable all the time, and I try to be nice, but the guy just drags and drags on me, asking my advice with his miserable software testing job, wanting me to cheer him up, wanting me to call him or do online chat, whatever. I'm about to the point where I want to advise Steve to leave his job and then not to call me anymore unless he's got happy news because he's depressing the mess out of me.

Anyway, back to the client. The client read my work log. He noticed that I didn't progress much last week as far as coding. He's about right except for the fact that I spent like 10 hours on a Friday to Saturday timeframe configuring a new staging server with all the required software, fighting with custom compile of PHP and the stuff that goes into that. (My last blog post explains a one-liner script that fixed me in 5 minutes, but I had to waste 10 hours before I found that.) And when I explained that, he was like, phhht, who cares? And then I have been waiting on XHTML templates in order to make my stuff look good, and they don't have this yet, and so I shrugged my shoulders, said what the hell, and wasted two days on the project schedule doing bitmap to XHTML conversion on my own with Gimp and Blueprint CSS. What an aggravating mess that was. I finally got it going and tested in FF2 and IE 7 at least for now, and it will do until the real templates arrive. But when I mentioned that to the client, again, he was like, phhht, who cares?

Now, when the client chats you and usually uses "lol" in his chats, but then suddenly stops using that and starts saying things like, "how much longer do you think this is going to take?" then ALARM BELLS SHOULD BE GOING OFF IN YOUR HEAD THAT THEY ARE NERVOUS ABOUT YOU AND YOU MIGHT LOSE THE CONTRACT. So, my advice is to handle it like so:

1. Ask them how long do they have for this project to be built. They'll tell you a number, but realize that no client in their right mind would tell you a reasonable number, and most clients want to not even think about how long it takes to work out quirks in the admin pages or handle bugs, so you can guarantee you'll need to take their estimate and tack on 3 weeks. Now, consider that -- their view of the timeline + 3 weeks -- and if you can't make it happen in that timeframe, then respond and say it's going to take 3 weeks longer than their estimate to handle misunderstandings and bug fixes, and then another x weeks to finish the project. When they ask about misunderstandings, I could give you countless examples. For instance, my last client wanted an admin system, so I whipped it out fairly fast based on his functional spec. But then he came back and said that he wanted to edit several member transactions at a time, rather than onesy-twosey, and that's the sort of misunderstanding that is not cleared up in the functional spec most of the time.
2. Tell them that they'll have a significant demo of some key user features within 7 to 10 days. And bust ass to get that goal accomplished.
3. Split the project up into 2 week periods with demos on each timeframe.
4. Stop all chats, reading websites and news, and so on. Get some good tunes to listen to so that you can get into your zone, build a project schedule and stick to it, don't over-engineer something, and bust ass getting work done because evidently you are behind schedule in their opinion.
5. Print up some signs for the wall above your monitor:

• Software does not write itself. It's up to you.
  
• Most clients only care about visual results in the web pages.
• Clients want visual results every two days. If you haven't delivered, then you have one day to make that up.
• If you consider a website as a set of forms, and haven't knocked out at least two forms a day, then your client will be disagreeable.
  

Note that all this gets easier once you've proven yourself to the client with the first phase of a project, or follow-on phases.

My other advice is to never ever take on more than 2 clients at once unless you can't pay your mortgage or vehicle payment, or unless the gigs are under $2000 a piece.

Listen to your conscience. If you have a sense of dread come over you about your work output, then you are more than likely right that your client feels the same thing. Every time I feel this, my client comes back and responds the next day with either bad news or "asking me how much further?" So listen to that, deal with that, and get some work done.