Making clients happy in moving target projects

Many web projects are moving targets - none of the people involved have a clear idea of what the final product should be. In this talk I will share strategies and techniques the team at Amazee Labs and I have adopted for making such projects concrete and tangible and, ultimately, more successful. We will not cover Scrum in general, but rather a specific set of agile project and account management skills that have proven useful.

As a web agency, we encounter many different clients. Some know exactly what they want, when they want it and why they want a specific feature or change. The majority of our clients, though, don’t have a clear idea of where they want to go. Perhaps they don’t have a good understanding of what’s possible using the technology at hand, or they find it hard to develop a vision for what their website will look like a few months into the future. In many cases clients are under political and organisational pressure to deliver a website without having significant experience in developing for the web. Our job is to help these clients complete a project which successfully serves their needs, on time and on budget.

And then there’s the other part of the equation - an agile team tasked with realising the project, comprising developers, designers, architects and conceptors. Agile teams love planning their work for a sprint and having enough time to think and create great solutions. Our job is to keep their life quiet.

Who am I?

My name is Stefanie Hetjens and I work at Amazee Labs in Zurich as Head of Client Services. Before Amazee I held several agency roles in the area web development, web analytics, marketing and advertising.