No Means No

You should take the work while you can get it. The economy is bad; you should save for a rainy day. You never know what kind of work is going to come out of this. This will look great in your portfolio.

Over the course of my career, I've done a lot of work for free. Sometimes it's a friend in need. Sometimes it's an artist or a cause in which I believe and want to help along. Sometimes it just sounds like fun. And most of the time, it ends up being more work than I expect. For the most part, that's okay. At Archinodes, we've always had at least one pro bono job on the go and believe it's an important part of the work we do. It allows us to give back in a tangible way and affords us the opportunity to experiment with new technologies and design approaches. But we've also learned to put limits on what we can provide. With both paid and pro bono work, our tendency is always to provide as much as we can. In the past, this has resulted in projects rapidly swelling beyond the estimated scope. There's always going to be a few more features that could be implemented. As such, we've had to learn how to say no.

When presented with a estimate, clients often have difficulty gauging how the number of hours corresponds to the actual delivered product and sometimes this can be difficult to explain. Parkinson's Law states that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," so it seems reasonable that clients would want to an estimate based on deliverables instead of hours. Hours can disappear quickly. But we don't do our work in a vacuum and more often than not the client's engagement and responsiveness serves to determine the expediency of the project's completion.

So we've learned that in order to managed these contracts, we need to be better communicators than our clients. We need to be able to communicate when projects are approaching the limits of the scope estimate. We need to keep our clients, both paying and pro bono, informed of the progress. And sometimes we need to be able to say no.