25 Jul 2010, Posted by The Bear in Agency Life,Print,Web, 0 Comments

You’ll like this, but not a lot.

A little tale for you.

A man once set a challenge to three great magicians.

“Present me with the greatest illusion ever!”

The three magicians worked tirelessly to come up with the greatest trick they had ever conceived, and rather than give the entire illusion (what with the Magic Circle, and all) away, each magician went in and told the man what his trick would do. The man was impressed with what he heard from each magician. After thinking long and hard, he decided on his favourite illusion and chose his magician.

The chosen magician was overjoyed, and set straight to work on preparing his final grand illusion. It would take him weeks to be completely ready to show the man, lots of preparation and planning was required.

After only a couple of days, there was a knock at the magicians workshop. It was the man, and he was interested to see how the magician’s grand plan was coming along.

“Ah, but you must wait until I am ready to show you my illusion, sir”, said the magician, “otherwise, the illusion is ruined”

The man was not happy, he had searched long and hard for the right magician, and wanted to see how the illusion was coming along.

“But if I show you now, you will not see the wonder of the prestige”, said the magician, with great concern.

His client was not budging though, and took a seat in the middle of his workshop. He was refusing to move until he saw something.

Very reluctantly, the magician agreed to show the man where he was up to with his illusion. The man was very happy, he moved his seat over to the side of the room and waited for the illusion to begin.

The illusion began, and the man sat forward on his chair to see his dream realised.

“This is going to be incredible!”, he thought to himself.

To his horror, he looked up and saw an unpainted box being lowered from the ceiling on a series of pulleys and mechanisms.

“STOP STOP STOP!”, shrieked the man. “WHAT IS THIS, NONSENSE? I’M PAYING FOR THE GREATEST ILLUSION EVER, NOT THIS!”

“But this WILL be the greatest trick ever, you just haven’t seen it finished!”, replied the frustrated magician. “It has to be seen on the stage, with the elements positioned correctly, and the workings tucked away from prying eyes”.

The man didn’t understand, surely this is not how these things are done?

……..

There ends the little tale.

I wrote it to try and highlight the worrying situation where a client wants to see an unfinished staging site, on a testing server.

What should be done?

Here are a few thoughts on what should be done in a client/agency situation like the one above:

1. Don’t let it get to that point. From a client-management perspective, the client should be briefed on schedule at the start of the project. This schedule should include when the client will get to see the staging server. Any requests to view prior to that date should be politely deflected.
2. Explain the pitfalls. The client may not understand how a site goes from a concept stage into a build stage. Clearly explain to them that it’s a transitional stage and best kept under wraps until everything is in place, and the above agreed date has been reached.
3. Keep the client busy. The development process can take time. The client can easily become impatient during this process if they have nothing to do. There’s plenty they can be getting on with during the development process, though: image-sourcing, content writing (if they have a news section on the site, get them to prepare a good chunk of articles, ready for launch), product sourcing for e-commerce sites and refining their strategies to drive traffic to their shiny new web site.

I’ve seen the same situation apply to large print projects, too. The above principals of managing the client can (and absolutely should) still apply.

-

James Kindred is co-founder and Art Director of Condiment, a design and creative communications agency in the centre of Ipswich, Suffolk.

Thanks to Beatriz AG for the pic.