Having worked on hundreds of projects over the years, I have found variations to be an inevitable part of every project across industries and project types.
From experience first building bridges, highways, and tunnels as a Civil Engineer. Then building websites and apps while running a web development agency. And recently managing advertising campaigns while running a digital marketing agency. I cannot think of a project where either the client requested changes different from their initial brief, or the realities of the real world meant changes of some kind impacted costs, durations, and outcomes.
Variations are already considered one of the major uncertainties for anyone experienced in managing a project. However, understanding why they happen can lead us to better ways of anticipating and managing them for our own projects.
Evolution of Ideas and Interpretation
Ideas are simply not perfect when first developed. Plus our ability to initially interpret these ideas to others is often terrible.
Expanding on that, when we get an idea we form bits and pieces of that idea in our head. How it might look or how it might work is not fully formed. Then getting those bits and pieces out of our own head and perfectly into someone else’s is exceedingly difficult. Most don’t have the skills to conceptualise their ideas and express them in a way that is easy for others to understand.
Let us say we have an idea for a new phone app, we can likely picture how great it would feel using our new phone app and how it could make our life better. But how does someone without experience express that feeling into a technical feature set, user experience, design aesthetic, functionality, etc.
The ability for someone to interpret their idea needs to evolve. This evolution is usually only possible by diving deeper, they need to explore the idea more, see it in different ways.
In a lot of cases with clients, this does not start happening until they can start to see the bits and pieces of the project come together. Their ability to perceive the result and interpret it evolves to a point where they start getting a clearer picture and thus start requesting changes.
Basically, your clients do not always have experience of explaining their ideas and wants for their project. But their ability to interpret their ideas to you improves as the project progresses. This is one big reason why we should expect changes.
It is up to the experienced party to ask the right questions and communicate with the client in a language and medium that they understand best to help speed up this idea evolution process.
Anything that can go wrong…
The widely spread Murphy’s Law adage “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” can come across as a negative outlook for a project, however, that is not the message behind it and that is certainly no reason to dismiss it.
Having the adage in your mind can serve as a reminder that aspects of a project are not always within our control, and while we should not expect things to go wrong, we should have a plan for if or when they do.
It could be wet weather that halts a construction job, uncovering a historical site, an illness that delays key personnel in a project, changes to policies, power outages, or impacts from a global pandemic. The list is pretty much endless.
These things happen all the time, without prejudice and they can change a project in unknown ways.
It is impractical to anticipate everything that could go wrong, so, allowances need to be made in your agreements for these unexpected events.
There are always unknowns
As we gain more experience we gain the foresight to know what could possibly happen. Despite this, there can still be a bunch of unknown variables that are unavoidable.
As an example, when working as a civil engineer we were required to resurface a highway. We had to remove the old layers of asphalt and prepare the subgrade (soil layer below the road) for the new surface. It was almost impossible to know what we would find under the old asphalt beforehand and when we got there. We found large boulders, voids, and a bunch of rubbish. It was just not suitable enough to build the new road over. It is also likely the main reason for the poor quality (Fig .1) of the old surface.
This had been anticipated, but the severity was still an unknown, which resulted in additional work to remove all the poor subgrade and extra cost to import new better-quality subgrade. This extra work required changes to the project agreement.
It could be general variables like how long particular tasks could take or how getting paperwork signed off from authorities. Or, more project specific variables like how many leads you can generate for an advertising campaign. Or, how much subgrade soil will need replacing like my experience above.
Having a good understanding of the variables in your projects can make it easier to clearly define them. Which, can be used in your agreements to help pre-empt them for each party, reducing surprises and potential disputes.
The benefit of expecting variations
The point of expecting variations in projects is to be able to better prepare for them.
This could be by creating agreements that include terms for how variations should be handled. Terms that include:
- how a variation is defined for the project,
- what costs, and delays to expect when variations are requested,
- or, even what allowances are considered to account for unexpected variations.
You can start finding patterns or recurring variations with your projects. Which, you can begin to develop processes to better guide and communicate with your client’s or vendor’s. So, they can know how to brief better and what to expect.
Summing up
There are three key reasons, I have identified, for why variations are a natural part of all projects:
- Ideas and interpretations change
- Anything can happen
- Unavoidable variables
In categorising these reasons, we can do a better job of understanding and pre-empting them. We can then better manage expectations, reduce the impact of variations, and have a clear agreed upon plan for when variations inevitably happen.
