Maybe you’ve built a website that the client decides to modify with no regard for best practices or usability. Or you’ve set up and managed their Facebook or Twitter channels, building the conversations and exchanges to a fever pitch, only to watch their updates and tweets generate crickets. All your hard work — on the client’s behalf, of course — disintegrates before your eyes.

What do you do when you’ve handed over the assets that your client has paid for, and they proceed to muck things up? Here are some tactics to temper the pain:

1. Take out the emotion. Anyone good — developer or creator — infuses passion into their work as well as blood, sweat and tears. But when your contract is over, you have to cut emotional ties with the project or the product.
2. Be prepared for potential disaster. Once something is out of your hands, it is no longer within your control. You have to ready yourself emotionally — and legally — for the possibility that your client will destroy the work you’ve done. Think about adding a clause into your contracts that outlines how you’ll respond to any changes that occur because the client is managing the assets you’ve turned over.
3. Have the conversation. Be open with your client about that clause in your contract that states what you may do after the contract ends. Assure them that you are all for empowering your clients to take over their assets and offer training and guidance, but make it clear what your professional response will be if they deviate drastically from best practices.
4. Develop a contingency plan with your client. Ask your client how they’d like you to handle the potential situation of witnessing them making a gross misstep in modifying the work you’ve done or mismanaging something. What would they want you to do if you saw them go astray?
5. Document carefully. While you are managing the assets, document everything. Take screenshots, track things, measure things, list things and compile any information that gives a clear picture of what you did and what was working while the assets were in your hands. After the contract ends, if you see problems arising, document everything to show the “before” and “after.” Record your assessment of their changes using clear, unemotional language and outline where you feel they’ve taken a wrong turn.
6. Make your case to step back into the mix. If you’ve kept the lines of communications open with your former client, approach them respectfully with your assessment and review the state of what you created for them. (Remember, again, to take out the emotion). Give a solid business case for re-engagement to help them get back on track. A smart businessperson will take the data you give them and will determine the ROI of renewing a contract with you versus letting their assets flounder or fail. Throughout this process, stay positive, encouraging and helpful.
7. Cut ties. If your former client decides they can handle things — and you feel they’re on a downward spiral — exercise your “what we’ll do if you mess things up” clause in your contract. The best course of action if there is no way to salvage the work you did is to distance yourself from the mess. You might consider removing the case study you’ve had on your website. Better yet, make sure your case study doesn’t link to the actual site or asset but instead uses screenshots that demonstrate the work you did. You can include a professionally-worded statement that the contract with the client ended on a particular date, and you are no longer engaged in managing the asset or that the client took over and that the current asset reflects their modifications. Again, stay positive. Never badmouth a client even if they are no longer your client. In the worst-case scenario, you may have to entirely remove any references to the client or the work you did for them to protect your company’s reputation. Only you can decide if and when drastic measures are necessary. At that point, focus on the good work you have done and continue to do and chalk it up to life as a consultant. You can only do so much, and once something is out of your hands, you just have to let it go.

What have you done in the past when a client messes things up?

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The trick with time tracking is arriving upon a degree of detail that’s both useful and efficient. It doesn’t help you if keeping track of things is all you end up doing because it’s such a time and attention-intensive process. Conversely, a general account of “Peformed project-related work” for a time block of eight hours isn’t particularly illuminating, either for the client or yourself. So how granular should your time tracking and reporting be?

I worked with one company that insisted on providing time reporting for all project staff in 15-minute increments to all of its clients. It might seem impossible, and in practice, it was, though that didn’t change the wording of the guidelines. What ended up happening was that either the client would demand simpler reporting, or company assets on assignment would “go native” and refuse to submit such ridiculously extensive accounting of their time.

Over time, the most sensible way of going about time tracking for the company became apparent. Generally speaking, project staff would report changes in activity throughout the day in blocks of time of no less than half an hour, and no more than three. Then before passing on said info to the client, administrative staff would edit it, depending on the needs and wants of the particular client stakeholder receiving the report.

As a web worker working on a contract basis from home, your process should be similar. The easy part is knowing to what degree of detail you need for your own purposes of professional development: experience will tell you that. Determining what a client wants is trickier, but should follow a similar logic. Arrive at a standard first through trial and error with some early projects, and then use that as the template for all future engagements. Solicit and pay attention to client feedback after that to determine what’s right for the person you’re currently working with.

As with most things, the best way to go about it is to avoid extremes. Report too much or too little, and you’re likely to either over- or underwhelm a client. The perfect balance is hard to achieve, but a good balance shouldn’t be too hard to arrive at.

How do you determine how granular to make your time tracking?

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In this post, I’m going to list the standard things I provide every client. If any of these elements are missing, I find that someone walks away dissatisfied, be it the client or me. When present, they seem to allow things to progress fairly smoothly, although, as we all know, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

Contract Document

Get it on paper. This is something I can’t stress enough, and something which still gets forgotten or overlooked so often it makes me doubt our capacity for learning as a species. If you need any evidence about the necessity of a contract document, look no further than the recent kerfuffle between TechCrunch and Fusion Garage over the CrunchPad/JooJoo device.

You don’t have to spend hours putting together a huge and complex contract before you start doing any work. At one firm I used to work with, we would issue proposals that included an abbreviated contract component. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t require a massive amount of time upfront when we weren’t yet getting paid, but it did ensure that clients felt the agreement was strong, and protected the interests of all parties.

Simple Mission/Objective Statement

The key to the document I’m talking about in this section is that it be simple. Make sure that you can express in plain language what it is the project is meant to achieve. Ensure that both you and your client agree on the wording, and agree on what it means before you set it in stone.

It will also help if this statement details a specific product or project endpoint that’s measurable. Otherwise, you might run into problems with an unknown quantity or an ambiguous endpoint that could result in a contract that drags on to a point where it isn’t really profitable for you to work on it any further.

Scheduled Check-Ins

Just like your significant other, your client is going to want you to check-in once in a while to make sure everything is still OK. It can become quite annoying, depending on the client, though you should always remember that the client is risking money on you as a contractor, so progress updates really are their due.

However, you can make it easier on yourself. At project outset, set up a regular schedule for progress updates, and hopefully that will curtail some of the unnecessary looking over the shoulder clients tend to do. It will also give you mini-goals to work towards between your larger milestones or deliverables, which should keep you on target.

Scope Change Documents

This isn’t strictly always necessary, but if it looks like the scope of the project is going to change, then it’s a definite must-have. I have a template of this type of document ready to go at project outset, in fact, because I end up using it so often, even though it only comes into play when the project you find yourself doing deviates from the one you set out to do.

As soon as you anticipate having to do more or different work than you and the client had agreed upon, the best thing for all involved is to provide them with a scope change document for approval before proceeding, unless you absolutely know that you have free reign. You’ll be protecting yourself from a whole heap of trouble, believe me.

Needs and Wants

Not every client will want all of the things I’ve listed here. In fact, a good many of them may try to talk you out of some of these. The fact remains that I think they’re necessities, and most clients will, too, once you actually use them. In the end, it’s all about making sure everyone involved gets what they want out of a project, not just what they think they want.

Do you agree with this list? Is there anything missing?

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Digital Signatures: The Facts

A digitally signed contract is just as legitimate as one signed by hand in most countries. There is plenty of precedent dating from the time when people were first signing and returning contracts by fax. If you ever need to, you can take someone to court to enforce a contract signed electronically. However, policies on accepting digital signatures can vary from company to company. Where one company will be perfectly comfortable accepting all your paperwork by email, another may want you to fax or mail in signed documents. We’re moving towards being able to do business without hard copies of our documents, but we’re not quite there.

The Strength of a Signature

There are several different ways that you can sign a document electronically. The big difference is in how the signature is verified:

• Your computer: Some software timestamps your signature and records the computer you used.
• Your IP address: Especially common with online services, your signature is recorded along with your IP address
• Public Key Infrastructure: Your signature is verified with a certificate issued by a trusted third party.

There’s a trade-off between the options: It’s harder to verify the first two options than PKI, but it can be difficult for an individual to get the required certificate for PKI. There are some online applications that use their own certificates in order to verify your signature, such as RightSignature. In comparison, Adobe Acrobat Professional allows you to create a digital signature that is verified based on the computer used. It can also use a certificate, but if you do not provide it with one, Adobe Acrobat will rely on your computer for verification.

Choosing a Signature Solution

Assuming that your employer or client doesn’t have an online application or a software package that they’d prefer you to use for your digital signatures, you’ll have to decide which option works best for you. It’s hard to find an option that is free as well as trustworthy. As long as you’re willing to spend a little bit of money, though, you can manage your contracts inexpensively. Personally, since I already have Adobe Acrobat on my computer, I rely on it, although I do not have a certificate to use with the software. While this is considered to be a less secure system than PKI, I haven’t had any problems with any document I’ve signed (even my 1099s). The downside is that Adobe Acrobat does not manage the entire signature process in the way that many online applications can — some will even send out emails reminding people to sign contracts.

What app do you use for digital signatures?

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• Consulting agreement
• Finder’s agreement
• General release
• Non-disclosure agreement
• Non-circumvention agreement
• Promissory note
• Sale of goods agreement
• At-will employment agreement
• Intellectual property agreement

Each template is fairly basic. The consulting agreement, for instance, offers spots to fill in information about both parties, as well as nine terms (each of which you can choose to remove, as well as an option to add further terms). Each term is constructed in legal terms, but most have several spots that are filled out with something along the lines of “Insert description of services and schedule.” You can also customize agreements with your own logo.

The web site provides a service beyond simply letting you put together templated agreements. It also allows you to acknowledge contracts, effectively signing them online without the back and forth or hunt for a fax machine that a printed contract can require. The interface can also make negotiating contract terms relatively simple, including a messaging system that allows you to walk through each term with a prospective client. You can also email forms, and save them as PDFs from the interface.

If you read through FastDue’s documentation, you’ll come across the suggestion that you run any legal agreement you make past a lawyer before you sign off on them. In general, I can’t recommend anything else — the fact is that we all really ought to run any contract we sign past our lawyer. But things don’t always work out that way. For web workers, it’s not unusual to sign a contract with a client in another state or even another country. Most lawyers are very familiar with the laws in their home state, but aren’t as comfortable with how laws in other states or countries can affect your agreement. To make matters more complicated, some freelancers and other web workers take on new projects often enough that taking each new contract to a lawyer has a prohibitive cost.

It’s not a perfect solution — after all, not all jurisdictions recognize electronic signatures on contracts yet. But FastDue does make it possible to get an agreement in place quickly, making it easier for web workers to create new contracts and legal agreements on the fly. As long as you feel comfortable with handling your contracts online, FastDue is a good solution to simplify the process.

Where do you get your legal documentation drawn up?

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Format

Choosing the right format and delivery method for your feedback form will have a profound effect on how often you actually get it back filled out.

Personally, I like to use an Adobe PDF form because it’s easy for the client to use: simple, portable, compatible across platforms and distributable both online or off. If you don’t have a copy of Acrobat, you can use OpenOffice Writer to create PDF forms instead. An HTML form is a good alternative, though if you don’t have any HTML experience it might be more difficult to put one together. As a final option, be ready and willing to call and conduct your survey on the phone directly with a stakeholder, since this may be the only way to ensure you get some kind of feedback.

Question Composition

As for the questions you ask, you may first want to decide how many you’re going to use. For the sake of ease of use I generally ask between 10 and 20 questions, depending on the length and type of engagement. You don’t want to use too many, since you risk exasperating your client, but if you use too few, your results won’t be very meaningful.

The nature and wording of each question will also determine how meaningful the answers are. The most important thing to consider when composing your questions is to consider how you might act based on the answers you receive. If, for example, you ask, “Was the project I delivered what you anticipated receiving upon completion?” with the client answering on a scale of one to five, the answers will be meaningless without additional questions. Regardless of whether you score high or low, you won’t know how to change your practice based upon those results.

It’s better to ask more specific questions like, “How satisfied were you with any pre-project materials received?” since this points to a specific area that you can act to improve. As a rule of thumb, ask yourself what you would do following a positive or negative response to each question you come up with. If you can’t come up with anything, then it’s probably not a good question.

Breaking your questions up into categories (with subheadings) is also a good idea, as it will focus your client and, again, help make your results more meaningful. You also might want to ask for a general measure of satisfaction for the project as a whole, just to see if your client’s micro and macro observations are consistent.

Finally, always leave space for extra comments, context for answers given, etc. Whether or not it gets used, respondents will appreciate the opportunity to speak outside of your prescribed boundaries.

Scale

Form design is one area where you don’t want to get too far off the beaten track, because it’s a genre that people are already very much acquainted with. You can use that familiarity to your advantage. Using the typical answer scale of scores from one to five, for instance, will give your respondents instant, easy access, because it’s something they’ve seen in many different forms before.

Of course, that still leaves choices about how to use that scale. Personally, I use the one to five scale differently depending on what kind of feedback I’m looking for. If I want something that I will be using as a reference for future engagements, for instance, I might orient the numbers from highest to lowest, which seems to encourage people to choose higher numbers overall. If I want more criticism, because I’m using the survey results primarily for internal, professional development purposes, I’ll use the reverse tactic and order the numbers from lowest to highest.

Designing a good feedback form is not easy, and you’ll no doubt encounter many competing opinions on how best to do it. A good tip, though, is to always offer some kind of incentive to fill out the form, whether it be a discount on the client’s invoice, some kind of free service like a client-sector specific research report, or a charitable donation. Believe me, feedback is well worth the investment.

How do you gather client feedback?

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Then there’s that 0.5% that I wish I never worked with.  They scammed me out of my work, never paid, and tried to get away with it.  After taking advantage of me, they repeat the same process with the next freelancer, and the next, and the next, until threads about their scamming ways start appearing in message boards.  Does this sound familiar to you?  If not, count yourself lucky.

It’s a good thing that this hasn’t happened to me in the last three years.  I probably owe this to the fact that I pay attention to any red flags or hunches I get when negotiating with new clients.

Things to watch out for

Of course, the first place where you can spot any red flags is the first email you receive from a prospective client, or the ad they place.  Previously, I talked about dissecting online job placement ads.  One of the points I raised was that the way an ad is written often reflects the communication style of the business.  If the ad is very detailed and well written, it usually indicates professionalism.  It’s alright for potential clients to have grammar or spelling mistakes, but when the sentences are too vague or hardly make sense, future communication might be such a hassle.  The same could be said for the first exchange of emails.

Watch out for ads with a defensive tone, such as “Don’t send an outrageous quote, as I can get my neighbor’s son to do this” or “This shouldn’t cost/take more than….”  This just goes to show the small value they’ll be placing on you and your work.

The number one thing that makes me nervous about a potential client is when they’re hesitant to sign a contract.  Not because of anything in the contract per se, they just don’t like contracts, period.  I’ve yet to hear a solid argument against a contract, but here are some of what I’ve heard so far:

• “But it’s only for 3 articles! Surely, you don’t need a contract for a job this small.”
• “I never had to sign a contract with a freelancer before, why should you be the exception?”
• “What for?  I trust that you’ll deliver your end of the deal.  Don’t you think it’s unfair that you don’t trust me?”

Here’s why no argument ever works: the contract is there to protect the rights of both the freelancer and the client.  It defines who owns the work, the scope of the project, and the details of the payment.  It sets clear expectations on both sides, with each party feeling confident that he or she won’t be messed around with.  Honest clients usually understand and appreciate having a contract, even if you’re the first freelancer to send them one.

Another thing that raises my doubts is when the new client wants to pay only when you’ve sent the entire project to them.  They don’t want to make down payments, and they don’t want to pay you after each project milestone.  You’re supposed to fulfill your end of the deal first, and then get paid.  After all, how can they trust you when they only met you online?

Agreeing to this kind of payment scheme is like leaving your laptop unguarded in a busy coffee shop, with your PayPal username and password as the desktop wallpaper, to boot.  You’re setting yourself up to be robbed.  True, your client might have made an honest mistake, but if they can’t see how this kind of arrangement is grossly unfair to you, then the project isn’t worth the risk.

It’s also important to pay attention to what comes up when you’re profiling your client.  You’re bound to research your new client anyway, especially for big projects.  What comes up when you enter his name or the company name into a search engine?  Are there any negative results?  How does he answer the client questionnaire you sent?  Is he evading questions that are integral to the project?

What to do when a red flag goes up

Like I said earlier, a red flag is sometimes an honest mistake.  But this doesn’t mean that you should spend hours of your time trying to convince your client to agree to the conditions you want to set.  If you’ve sent the email or made the phone call that explains your side, that should be enough.  Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting your time and energy with a person or business that doesn’t respect the work that you do.

Were you ever scammed by a client?  How did it happen?  Was there anything that raised your doubts from the start?

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Since launching in 1999, the company has worked to expand their offerings, integrating some features to create more than just a job site and more of a work tool. What interested me beyond the job marketplace is Elance’s concept of a Remote Work System with the goal of creating a remote workspace for freelance workers to provide them with additional incentive to continue using the site after the job match has been made. The features are meant to help service providers manage a part of their work through Elance and give buyer and service provider more ways to connect and transact business.

The areas Elance has been beefing up to create their “remote work system” include:

1. The Interview Process. Beyond matching up a buyer with a service provider with specific skills that meet their project needs, Elance offer an integrated chat function and a click-to-call function that allows the buyer to place a call to the provider anonymously and for free. Providers can also take “certification” tests via Elance to evaluate their level of expertise and ostensibly giving buyers more of an assurance of a provider’s skills.

2. The Payment System. Elance now offers an escrow account so that once a buyer and seller match up, the buyer can place the payment into an escrow account via Elance with the intent to assuage the provider’s mind that the money is there upon completion of the project. The payment still needs to be triggered by the buyer so even once a provider completes the job, there is no guarantee that they provider will be paid. However, Elance also offers dispute assistance for both buyers and providers.

3. Tracking Project Status. With a new status reporting system in place, buyers can set milestones for providers to meet, and providers can report on their status showing progress against milestones on a percentage basis. Elance recently implemented  a time tracking widget that a provider can apply to a deliverable or milestone, add notes for the buyer, and attach files. The time tracker can also cover units of work such as blog posts. Status reports can then be converted into invoices once work is complete.

The company says that while they are offering enhanced features to help the buyer and provider manage a portion of the project, their site is not necessarily a replacement for a more robust project management system like Basecamp. Like Basecamp, however, the new Elance features offer an archive of interactions and communications between buyer and provider which is especially invaluable for a provider who is working on multiple projects at once.

Out of curiosity, I did several searches to see what freelance opportunities fit my skillset, experience and interest. There were a good number of web site and blog content development jobs open for bid, however, I found too many that didn’t seem to add up in terms of pay.

For example, one blogging job had a budget of $500 but were looking for someone to craft 5 blog posts per week. The duration of the project wasn’t visible but after just a few months time, the pay per post for that job would be embarrassingly low.

Another blogging job was paying an hourly rate which seemed a little unusual for work that is more commonly paid by the unit i.e. on a per post basis. Another wanted 20 articles for less than $500. Maybe a good job for an inexperienced writer working up some portfolio pieces, but there is no way to slice $500 by 20 and get anything resembling decent pay.

So while I’m not convinced Elance contains a wealth of well-paying, high-quality writing jobs for established Web content developers (I can’t comment on the programming jobs since I’m not a programmer), it could be a good place for a novice to find their first jobs. Plus the site provides some extras to help  manage those jobs.

What has been your experience with Elance or other “bid” job sites?

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