I know you hate this kid! About underestimating digital projects.

Over the last 15 years, I have “met” him regularly. The boy who can do the eCommerce solution or the CMS portal in half, oh what am I writing, a quarter of the time of an agency. He is usually the godson or son of a good colleague of a relevant decision-maker. And we service providers then have to listen to things like: “It can’t be that difficult” or “my godson is doing it on his afternoon off”.

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No plan of nothing or deliberate uncertainty?

I have been annoyed often enough in such situations, but I don’t do it anymore. Instead, I see them as a signal to immediately withdraw from negotiations with the customer.

Because with such statements, the customer shows that he either doesn’t understand the subject matter or is deliberately trying to unsettle us as a service provider. While 10 years ago the former was still a matter of course and acceptable, these days are over.

In an economy where it is impossible to avoid digital, it is part of the rudimentary basic knowledge of decision-makers to understand how good quality code is produced.

Secondly, making the service provider feel insecure has always been wrong, but in the early days of the industry, when many of us still had to convince every customer of the importance of the Internet and there could be economic dry spells, this toad was swallowed. Today, nobody needs to do that anymore.

Why are Internet projects always underestimated?

I think that very few decision-makers deliberately want to make us service providers feel insecure or to drive us crazy. Rather, I notice time and again that many small stories contribute to these people actually thinking that it is very easy. Stories like that of the student who developed an app that had 500,000 downloads within 2 weeks or stories of corporate website relaunches within 3 weeks.

The fact that this corporation is a small business with 20 people and not a company with 2,000 employees and a staff of almost 200 is lost in the euphoria.

Classic 1: Reduction to the visual

This used to happen quite often. The customer’s contact person didn’t understand why change XY would take 10 days, because “the field only needs to be moved down and the order changed”. However, the fact that a large part of the module was rewritten in the process did not fully penetrate even after the umpteenth attempt at explanation.

Classic 2: “Just like Google”

I also always found and still find discussions about the search great. It’s not as if I’ve fallen behind in the field of search. We have a lot to do with complex and high-performance search functionalities. But it can still happen in 2015 that the customer simply states “just like Google” in the requirements definition.
In some cases, and these are the very far-fetched ones, “at least like Google” can also be found. And yes, you can also read this in large consultant-supported RFPs.

However, it is quite easy to get rid of these customer hoaxes: I always calculate with relish how many people are working on the search at Google and put this in a loose relation to the project budget – in the style of “if we are to implement the search in this way, we need 480 million times the budget you give us, not including the actual eCommerce platform”. This usually makes people laugh and you can then have a serious discussion about meaningful search functionality.

A phenomenon in patriarchal small businesses? Not at all!

When I started my career in the internet industry, dealing with mainly smaller clients, I imagined that this was a phenomenon of patriarchal small businesses. Over the years, I have learned that this is not the case.

Even very senior decision-makers regularly underestimate digital projects. This is also reflected in budget specifications. It is common for retailers to allow new offline stores to cost +3 million, but an eCommerce platform hardly gets a budget of 500k euros.

This is not malicious intent, but simply ignorance. Large, complex projects cost money. The larger and more complex the customer, the more expensive it becomes. As a rule, not in percentages, but in multiplication factors. Because in addition to the actual coding and functional design, there are many other things to consider.

Things like load tests, external security and code reviews, hundreds of audits, communication, internal constraints, lots of stakeholders, etc. Most decision-makers forget this because they are usually unaware of it. So, as is so often the case, experience is key.

There is also no consensus in the industry itself

Even in the industry itself, there are very different ideas about what is expensive and what is good value. Two years ago, when Namics was awarded a CHF 13 million CMS project by the Swiss government, the dust settled. I remember countless conversations with mainly smaller agency representatives who found this sum simply abhorrent.

Excessive demands on solution and service provider

Many could not imagine that you could spend so much money on a web project. And very few thought you should. I thought both were actually okay. Because if you look at the tender, you realize that as a provider you have to meet so many costly requirements that you end up with these project budgets. The real criticism is directed at the Swiss government, which, in my view, defined a completely excessive framework of requirements. But that is not the fault of the service provider.

If you ever meet him in real life, this boy…

Yes then, my dear agency friends, why don’t you smack him? :-) Even I say that as a convinced pacifist and despiser of violence. Because you just can’t seem to shut him up.

Or much, much better, force him to do what he promised. On a school-free afternoon.