| Thanks for reading! >You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale. Yes, definitely. In my experience, the smaller scale makes it easy to manage, so you can nip problems in the bud more quickly. >>There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today. >I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with. Yeah, I think it's important to be vigilant to some degree, but some people are effective at suggesting useful improvements. TinyPilot's in-house devs, for example, will frequently suggest improvements to designs or architecture that will cost more up-front but will reduce costs long-term, and I love those kinds of suggestions. If the agency had a history of suggesting improvements and correctly estimating the cost of implementing them, then I'd be more open to their suggestions. But their track record was consistently to expand scope and run late, so I wanted to constrain scope as much as possible. |
The work I did as a web programmer for an agency (freelance) was similarly imbalanced with many "leaders" telling me what to do, (ie, project lead heavy, 1 designer, 1 programmer) and it was a mess and I won't bother with it again.