The Productive Way to Treat Your Outsourcers

d1ver

Hi, guys. Lately I've been busy with freelancing quite a bit and the more I do it the more I think there must be a more productive way of client<->outsourcer communications. Sometimes a lot of time is wasted on things that could've been done faster if approached in a more prepared way.
So I had this idea of making a paper, that will help get things more productive and explain both sides what they need from each other to work and not thread water.
And here it is:

http://artisaverb.info/Dialogue_Driven_Outsourcing.html

It's a wall of text, so I beg your pardon. If you actually think that some things don't make a point and just clutter the paper - please let me know. And this works the other way around too.=) I would really appreciate if you would have something to say on the subject.
In what cases do you feel your freelance work goes smoothly and why? What do you need for it go this way?

After some amount of polish and feedback I hope to start pitching it to clients and see if it would make any difference. Could be a bold move, since clients don't like to be told what to do, but I ain't got much to loose so why not.) It would be a nice experiment and any chance of getting a healthy and productive relationship instead of a time consuming and counter productive ones would be nice.

Cheers

Ruz

good on the whole. I have worked for employers who tried to heap all the blame on me when things went wrong, when they should have actually had the decency to look at the huge of amount of soul draining work they gave me.
It was the kind of work that should have been done in house quite frankly as it was 'very' technical and painfully slow to get anything finalised.
I had 2 stroppy managers with different opinions both telling me different things, wasting about 3 days of work.
Worst job ever:) though it was early on in my freelancing career. I am bit wiser to these kind of jobs now. I do take some of the blame for that job, but I actually learned a lot from the mistakes made by both parties.
If the job sets off alarm bells in your head as it did in this case, unless you are really desperate for the money, then leave it well alone.

That was the exception though as most of my jobs have gone smoothly. One particular client from the UK agreed a price then decided to underpay me to cover some perceived cost on his part.
Infuriating though not from the games industry

I stress though 98 percent of clients are fine with me as I work hard and try to resolve issues with them.

I actually find the smaller companies easier to work with, the larger ones can be a bit nasty/indifferent/reluctant to pay their bills and when you are getting the same money, you are better off working for the smaller company.
What companies seem to forget is that us freelancers talk about money a lot because we don't get a salary and we don't get paid until the job is totally finalised
( unless you are on a daily rate)
We are running a business too and we should be treated that way rather than an extension of their own set up.

d1ver

Hey, Ruz, thanks a lot for taking your time. And some tips and stories from your experience.) Yeah I agree about smaller teams and actually the most pleasant work for me was for a team of 3.=)

But there's this other issue, I sometimes work with post soviet union space studios and some of them, despite not being so small just don't have a clear idea about how freelancers work, but still feel in charge, because they are the ones with the munny. So it turns into a hassle at times.

But hey, do you think this paper could actually make someone put a little more thinking into what they do? Because that's actually what it was written for.)

Ruz

I think so d1ver. I am not so sure about the format. it's a bit like an open letter. perhaps a bullet time doc would be better though that's just me thinking aloud
yeah perhaps give really hard thought to the format. if it appears more as guidelines they might not feel so threatened by it:)
some studios/managers no matter what you say are going to still behave a certain way, but on the whole folks are reasonable
I suppose the only thing to worry about is that they might target you as the author if they don't like what you have to say