I must acknowledge it is crucial for a client to realize that the very effort of hiring a development team to perform complex duties (specifically for their expertise) is an act out of need of their services.
Because scope, time, and cost are all interrelated (can we remember this please?), there is absolutely no room for a client to request an expansion in scope and in the same breath become upset that time and cost need to expand as well. It continues to be an ongoing challenge to help clients maintain this mentality as a development shop.
Trust and transparency is key in relationships, and I only wish it were easier for small businesses to gain this when beginning and maintaining relationships with clients. Unfortunately, there is much hurt in the world we live in and the business relationship naturally carries a tension and common “protect your own” mentality. We at Elias desire to work differently, and do everything we can to keep growing in this area of building trust with transparency. We are in constant thought about how we can work with integrity, meet the needs around us, and offer our skills with pleasant confidence.
My question stands: why are relationships with this kind of trust, transparency, and mutual respect so few and far between?
There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding of the challenges developers face as well as the perspective that we take too long and cost too much as compared to other industries. To many outsiders, we aren’t much different from a mechanic when a lot of us are on par with engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.
I’ve found that it doesn’t take much to convince someone that what we do is a very challenging task to do well. Just show somebody the inside of boxes.css and tell them that this is just the styling info. 🙂
Ultimately, we need to spread awareness to our clients that this is an industry-wide issue that they will find anywhere and that the open source movement has made delivering high quality solutions at an affordable price much much easier. It really is amazing that we continue to receive so many complaints on pricing after handing over multi-million dollar software for free.