Unit’s approach to working with other agencies to successfully bring a client’s project to fruition is simple, straight-forward, and has had a genuinely positive impact on the quality of our work. It allows us to maintain professional relationships. It ensures the client receives our best effort. It enables close collaboration with the other contractors which provides the best possible results in the final product.
Despite these obviously desirable outcomes, our approach seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the web design and development industry. What follows is an explanation of the way in which we prefer to work and why it is the best-case scenario for our clients.
The Allegory of the Stool
To understand the client/agency relationships we encourage as well as why we believe they are effective, it is useful to consider a stool. Building a simple stool is not a particularly daunting task, but doing so successfully does require attention to a few critical details. The stool is the configuration of pieces (people) chosen to bring a project off.
The first critical element of a stool is the seat. The seat is the reason for having a stool in the first place and without a seat one can never have a stool. The seat is the project.
Next, one must add some legs to the stool in order to elevate the seat. After all, a seat on the ground does not a stool make. But how many legs to add? Can we get away with just one?
The One-Legged Stool
As it turns out, yes! A stool with only a single leg can be made to balance if it is carefully constructed and never disturbed. Yet, it is far from an ideal construction. It can tip in any direction and will do so when presented with the slightest turbulence. A person may sit on this stool, but not without constantly working to stay upright. Successfully using a one-legged stool is a precarious balancing act.
A project set up as a one-legged stool provides many points of failure and inherent instability.
In the design world, one-legged stools come about because of the all-too-common practice of subcontracting. More explicitly, they occur when Agency One are hired to deliver all aspects of a project and then Agency One, in turn, hire Agency Two (or more) to handle aspects of the project Agency One aren’t equipped to handle on their own.
There are myriad issues with subcontracting and in his article Lies, Deception, and Subcontracting, Andy has written about them at length, but the short version is that at some level the agency is dealing dishonestly with its client.
At worst, the agency is deceiving the client into believing that the agency is capable of work it cannot do and must hire others to accomplish. In this situation the client is kept in the dark about who is actually doing the work and a facade of responsibility is maintained by the agency. Participating in such a scheme is not only bad news for the project, it is also patently unethical.
Not all subcontracting is based on deception however. An agency could be perfectly forthright with its client about what its true capabilities are and who will be doing which parts of the project. Unfortunately, even a transparent subcontracting situation is a dishonest one. The agency is still assuming responsibility for work it isn’t doing and people it doesn’t manage. They are still building a one-legged stool.
Project collaborations set up this way are so unstable because a failure at any point can topple the whole process:
- If the subcontractor fails, the agency can’t pick up the slack for work it couldn’t do in the first place.
- If the agency fails (or bails), the client loses all of its hired talent.
- If the client pulls out, the agency is left holding the bill for its subcontractors.
- Depending on the situation, any of the preceding can result in litigation.
At Unit, we flat refuse to be part of the house of cards that is a one-legged stool project. Most of us have had the experience at some point in our careers and were left understanding just how demeaning and unprofessional subcontracting really is.
The Two-Legged Stool
Two heads are better than one and so is a stool with two legs better than the contraption with just one. While inherently unstable, a two-legged stool is easier to balance on because it can only tip over in two directions. Its instabilities can be predicted and planned for by an alert sitter. Still, the stool is not constructed for success and sitter is solely responsible for keeping the seat upright.
Two-legged stools are usable but take a lot of work to keep upright.
Clients, especially those that are unpracticed at managing such projects, have a tendency to segment the workflow. Perhaps they prefer to first produce all of the design comps and then later worry about building the site out. Or maybe they desire a working product before considering the design. If the project is not segmented chronologically it may still be segmented by function with the client providing all of the communication between different agencies.
In whatever arrangements the pieces end up, a two-legged stool is created when the client works directly with the involved agencies (good) but the agencies work independently of each other (not as good). Everyone is in an honest business relationship and there are fewer points of failure, but the project is susceptible to two major flaws.
Chronological Segmentation: Every project has tweaks. Adjustments must be made as the various pieces are integrated. If the project is set up so that one agency must fully complete its work before the other begins, then these adjustments become a major hassle instead of a natural part of the project end game. The worst outcome of this is the loss of trust from the client’s perception of a job imperfectly done.
Function Segmentation: It is proper that different people should handle the aspects of a project that fit with their expertise. But if a client keeps these people ignorant of each other it is setting itself up to be the communications hub for people who need to speak a completely different language.
Clients are experts in their business (or should be if you are going to work with them). They are not experts in your field and trying to communicate with other experts through your client is an exercise in futility. Not only will the messages not be conveyed clearly, but since neither agency has a commitment to work with the other, both will be mainly concerned with protecting their reputation (and work) from the influence of the “other guys”. This is far from ideal and puts the quality of the finished product in jeopardy.
Two-legged stool projects are not the end of the world and they can produce great results, but they do so in spite of their flaws. We see our fair share of these projects at Unit but it certainly isn’t our preferred way to work nor is it what we suggest to our clients.
The Three-Legged Stool
A stool with three legs is fully stable. It stands on its own. It supports a weight without the active involvement of the sitter. It requires a strong jolt to upset the balance of a stool standing on three legs.
Three-legged stools are the most stable and best set up for success.
When the client is working directly with all agencies involved in a project, and those agencies are collaborating with each other, a three-legged stool has been achieved.
It is the best-case scenario for all involved parties. The agencies are only contracted to do the work they are best suited for. They all have a direct line to the client and each other so no intermediary translation is needed. They can collaborate to integrate and adjust the project without affecting project quality or disturbing the client’s trust. The ramifications of any one party’s failure is mitigated as much as possible. Best of all the work, and not the politics, is in the best position to receive everyone’s focus.
This is how Unit loves to work. Three-legged stool projects have demonstrated superior results time after time and so we recommend it to all clients seeking our services.
