Hyping right in with Kevin Hoffman and the happy cog crüe talking about projects they’ve been in that have failed, and how to identify and eliminate those f-ups in the future.

They’re starting with easy-to-recover from failure.

Maintain scope

Don’t borrow from one budget to pay for another. Just stop, and issue something like change of scope. Communicate early and often so you don’t run out of money.

Did you test?

When you fail, you’ve got to own it. Apologize profusely, take the hit financially and take the abuse.

Scope and Expectations

Greg hoy was bleeding money on redesigns never ending. They had gone through 6 rounds without success, and exhausted all their resources.

He put together a series of 300px attempts, and save money by doing snippets to see what resonated. You have to think of creative ways to keep things moving.

Manage the unknown

Will Reynolds has a unique part of their client agreements is getting ahead of them. If you see things aren’t going well, call them and tell them to stop paying before they call you. It engenders trust.

When they told a client that the results weren’t good enough and to stop paying them for two months, they got three referrals in that time.

The ménage a trois
Adding third parties to your project

Greg story was working with a guy who literally left the client. The new guy had a completely different platform and approach, which they went with, but it didn’t deliver the results they needed. The site didn’t work right.

They went back to the client, and partnered with three different vendors, adding a month of project purgatory time, and lopped off a bunch of great features they just couldn’t do at that point.

Great panel I’ve got to leave early for to check Russ and Todd at Right Way To Wireframe

Related posts:

1. SXSW Live: Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together
2. SXSW live: Stories, Games, and Your Brand
3. SXSW Live: Right Way To Wireframe
4. SXSW Live: Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR