Should We Even Mention Our Process?
There have been numerous articles on high profile blogs over the years debating the value of process. Its a creative industry so some people see the art and other’s might see the business. And I guess it comes right back to how we perceive process. I’d argue that going from point A (nothing) to point B (any artifact or deliverable) has a process even if its an ad-hoc process. That, in itself, can be your process. And you could have a different process on every project or task.
My question of the week is really just to ask whether any of that stuff between point A and point B should be explained to the client or employer? Do they need to know how you achieved something as opposed to just creating the product to high quality and sending out the invoice.
One mistake I’ve repeatedly made over the last few years is attempting a level of transparency with my work. I’ve made it a practice to mention my progress constantly and try to offer up a series of prototypes (in code and documents) which show the state of the ballgame. And I do this to avoid being a black box employee who provides a mystery meat product, if that makes sense to anyone.
Recently I worked on a product writing content and doing functional graphic design (not code) where for some oddball reason I provided (an unheard of) mid-month deliverable. That was a full dump of what we had into a folder online with spelling mistakes, half written content as a warts-and-all working model. Big mistake. The emails flowed in about typos and then process was explained and then discourteous comments flew around behind the scenes. This isn’t an unusual response and I shouldn’t have provided that for them. It wasn’t a requested feature.
The client could not come to terms with paying for process like spelling correction, proof reading, drafts or research. That’s all in the process, an intangible. The client often only has the time to deal with black box models that provide a security - did I get my product on time? The reality was that month’s finished deliverable was provided at high quality and early, and had I never attempted the mid-month deliverable it would have never been an issue whether I spell checked first or last. For a number of isolated reasons we parted ways shortly after that point.
So what do you think, should we keep process to ourselves. Does the client need to have that level of breakdown provided to them with timesheets that explicitly state this 20 minutes went to task X and that 10 minutes went to task Y? Over a number of projects I’m coming to the opinion that process needs to be an almost in-house secret. This is what I do and here is the cost. Simply because people want to pay for products not process (which includes documentation and reports).
Don’t get me wrong, education of clients about quality is a good thing. They sometimes complain about that, too - not everyone wants to know. In future, I’ll stick to meeting deliverables they’ve asked for at the very beginning. What do you do? Are you explaining your process? I’m interested to hear.
