Ouch, Working for Free is Expensive

It would sure be nice if the laws of physics held for economics, but unfortunately we do not always get out of a project what we put in. Everyone business must face off against non-payment, late accounts and collection now and then. For small consulting companies and professionals, this is a pretty trivial task since the number of project managers and stakeholders lends itself to everyone being aware when work needs to be stopped on a project. As the number of employees and managers increases, though, the risk of not communicating stopped job status to all team members increases as well.

For purposes of illustration, consider an e-commerce web site project assigned to several teams each working on different aspects of the assignment. One team focuses on developing copy text, another developing search engine marketing, another performing graphic design and yet another developing the application logic behind the site. This project is but one of several that each team is working on simultaneously.

Each team is doing well and plugging along with each of their projects. In the meantime, the bill for the last deliverable on the e-commerce project goes past due. In this scenario, it is usually best to contact the client immediately to gauge their intentions - are they going to pay? Are they satisfied with the work? (I talked about some of the benefits of regular communication with clients in my last blog.) If it doesn't look like payment is on its way, it's a good idea to stop investing time into the project immediately, especially given the current state of the economy.

In the event that work needs to be stopped, the stop must be communicated to every individual across every team, beginning with the accounting department. With many tasks already assigned to various individuals across man teams and some tasks possibly subcontract to third party firms, ensuring that everyone is aware of the work stop may be difficult depending on the level of organization and communication within and between the project teams in addition to accounting. If work does continue, especially in the case of third party contractors, the project loss can get big quickly.

One approach to ensuring that project status is well communicated to all team members is holding regular project meetings to discuss status and details. One drawback is that it may not always be practical to arrange these types of meetings with busy schedules - another is that any team member not present may not get the information at all. Another approach is to integrate time tracking with project management such that all tasks to which time is attributable can easily be put on hold, thus eliminating the possibility of performing work. This, of course, relies on good time tracking practices in the first place.

The bottom line is that if a clear and consistent method of documenting and communicating project status to all team members is not in place, you can end up doing a lot of work that you never get paid for.