Part V: Working with a Digital Agency

Changing a brief mid-project

The project is moving along quite well, the design elements are looking good and progress on the development side is excellent. But you suddenly find yourself rethinking the entire project. Perhaps something has happened within your company, or market conditions have changed dramatically forcing you to change your entire strategy.

Any change brought about in the middle of a project is going to have time and cost implications.

Making minor changes to designs and functionality is expected in any project and is probably also agreed contractually.

However, in most cases if an entire design is to change beyond the scope of the original contract, you will be charged for the time to change the design and the milestones may have to be moved on, delaying the launch date of your project.

In some instances, an agency may send you a new quote for extreme changes, which you’d need to sign off before work commences. You could find this very frustrating, particularly if you are forced to make changes, due to economic or market related issues, even though you were happy with the first idea.

What you need to keep in mind is that your digital agency is probably working on several projects for various clients at the same time. A major change in project brief would require the agency to spend more time on your project, reducing the billable time they have allocated to other projects.

If several clients changed their requirements in mid-project and the agency didn’t charge for these they would soon be in financial trouble.

We recommend that you and your agency agree to the kind of changes you can make during the project within reason which you will not be billed for additionally.

For example, some agencies may allow up to three changes to a graphic design element before charging for changes. Ideally, you would want to keep changes to a minimum and that’s why a clear project brief and plan are essential (please see the previous installments of this series of articles on how to do this.)

In our next installment in this seven-part series of articles, we will look at launching the project and making minor tweaks once it is active.

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