Reject a milestone based on scope changes

[philomenaaah]

How to deal with a situation when a client don't give you all the information at beginning, but then he asks you much more work to be done after you accept a milestone? This is happening to me frequently despite all the questions that I make to understand the projects on fixed price contracts.

There is a point when you can actually do a little bit more to establish a healthy relashionship with your client, but sometimes the tasks that are asked and were not in the scope of the project take you so much time that the payment that your client is offering you is not enough to compensate the work that you are doing.

So, I'm wondering how to deal with this type of situations in future to not have to end contracts unnecessarily.

[feed_my_eyes]

---

---

Before accepting a contract, you make a clear list of deliverables, including how many revisions you will do, and ask the client if you have covered every aspect of the job. If the scope changes after you've accepted the project, then you ask them to release the previous milestone payment and create a new milestone for the price that you're willing to accept. If they say no, then you don't do any more work. 

[philomenaaah]

Thank you so much for taking some time to answer to my inquiry, Christine. Yes, I do that and I make sure that I only work with people that are available to discuss the project with me in those terms. But even after all that people ask me additional things for free and they try their best to not pay.

My concern when that happen is to stay strict to a "No" and end with a really bad feedback, as that can hurt my CSS.

If a client refuses to release a milestone that it's completed because he don't agree to pay fof the additional work what can I do besides reporting it to support?

[feed_my_eyes · Accepted solution]

Yes, there's always a worry about getting a bad review, but you could do endless revisions, work almost for free, and still get a bad review. So... your choice.

As for not releasing the payment - you submit your work and the client has 14 days to review it before you get paid automatically. 

[philomenaaah]

You are totally right. Thank you so much for your help.

[gina-herrera]

If it's happening that often, you may want to try raising your prices... that might seem counterintuitive but I found that as my rates climbed upward, less people wasted my time.

[philomenaaah]

Totally true, Gina. People tend to think twice when they pay a little more.

I don't know if this is happening only at the Portuguese market (I guess not), but the job offers I have seen around here are getting lower. Most part of the clients who contact me after I place my offer ask for discounts of 50% to 60%. It's not possible to work like that, obviously. And most of the clients who accept my prices ask me even more work right after I accept the contract. Sometimes minutes after. I'm making an effort to negociate with clients and talk about their projects in detail before accepting any contract. More than ever, I feel that I need to pay even more attention to details because of that.

[kinector]

I use these simple tricks:

1) Dig into the business of the client. Once you're sure your work is an effective solution to the business problem, few clients came back with more requirements as they would just lose time from their own side by doing that.

2) When quoting, list what you the client is going to get with what price and what the client is NOT going to get. I usually have "within-scope" and "out-of-scope" sections in the quotation.

3) Expect the unexpected by ALWAYS setting a higher price than your estimate of work would dictate.

[philomenaaah]

Very valuable information, Mikko. Thank you so much. That helped me a lot! Thank you.