Re: Workflow Problem with Client

Dean,

Man, I feel your pain. I am in an eerily similar situation. I work at a small university, mainly producing products for Distance Education, but we do the occasional job for the Marketing department, and we have many of the same issues. I do not have all the answers and am myself learning some things from this thread, but here's a few things that we do.

1. We bill the client. It's not much, basically a reimbursement for salaries. For example, I log my hours, figure out how much I get paid an hour by my department and bill those hours back to the client. If I use one of my student workers I back charge the client for those hours as well. This goes along with what mark has said. We tell the client that we only have so many hours to work on outside projects, but we can "hire" someone to help with it so that we can get it done in a timely manner. This is part of the politics that we have to play.

2. Let them go outside and bid a project, once. That's all it will take. We weren't working fast enough for the client on one project so they decided that bid out the editing. They were back in three months because the bid was about 7x what we were charging and they still couldn't get it done any faster! They love us now.

3. We are just beginning to implement a write and review policy. As someone mentioned they never know what they want and it tends to change by the day. We will on future projects write a treatment, get feedback, write a more specific one, get approval, write a script, get feedback, make changes, get it approved. When all of this is approved and has someone's signature on it we will start scheduling and shooting.

4. We will also probably use some version of Mark's budgeting idea. In the initial proposal I will estimate how much time it will take. When a number of hours has been agreed upon I will stick with that number. When those hours are up we will have to begin again with another proposal. Hopefully this will discourage the "grinder" type client that always wants one more revision.

FWIW,

Ken