Article
Working With Contractors Made Easy
Part 3 - Managing Contractors
Are you frustrated because your contractor doesn’t seem to be working as hard as you are on the project? Don’t be.
A good contractor should be hard working and dedicated but will rarely demonstrate the level of detail-oriented care that they would when working for their own clients. It’s unreasonable to expect a contractor to work at your level of dedication and ownership -- it’s just human nature. Someone who works hard, is consistent, and does good work should be enough, even if they don’t share your enthusiasm.
Effective management techniques are geared towards gaining high-quality, reliable, profitable, manageable, and predictable output from our contractors rather then trying to get them to ‘work as hard as possible.’ Have realistic expectations of your contractors, and maintain an understanding of their perspective by considering their level of experience, their loyalty to you, the competitiveness of your pay rate, and how interesting/challenging your project is to them.
What Should You Do When a Contractor Misses a Deadline?
Contractors may sometimes miss deadlines, but it’s your responsibility to shield your clients from any impact that may result.
Always be sure to leave plenty of time between your ‘internal deadline’ and your ‘client deadline.’ Always leave enough time to engage a second contractor to completely redo the work from scratch if the first contractor drops the ball. To accomplish this, you’ll need to get your contractors started immediately on any new work that comes in, to ensure you leave ample time for problems to be fixed.
Also, be sure to keep abreast of any potential problems in the project by establishing a coherent set of milestones/checkpoints with your contractors. There is no reason to be caught by surprise by a contractor who isn’t even close to the deadline as the final hour approaches. From day one, you should know the exact date that you’ll be deciding whether to switch to the alternate programmer or not.
For example, if I have a project that begins on January 1st and must be presented to the client on February 1st, I’d arrange something similar to the following schedule:
- January 2nd: Development Begins
- January 6th: First Deliverable – Beta
- Version with limited features
- January 8th: Second Deliverable – Mostly feature-complete beta
- January 8th: Internal Milestone: Decision to use alternate programmer or not is made on this day
- January 11th: Contractor Delivery Deadline
- February 1st: Actual Client Deadline
As a rule of thumb, I always triple the amount of time I estimate it should take to do the outsourced section of a project. Typically, this will allow the entire project to be done twice, should the need arise.
If a job with a contractor isn’t going well and you have a backup contractor available, use the alternate. Always be prepared to bail out early and decisively if you are nervous about the deadline – this isn’t the time to be generous or understanding with your contractors. It’s a time to cut your losses and move on.
Remember, if a contractor is consistently failing to deliver on time, you should probably discontinue working with that contractor unless special circumstances dictate otherwise. After all, one of the key benefits of using contractors is that enjoy the flexibility to pick and choose who does each project.
What Should You Do If Your Contractor Submits Sub-Par Work?
Poor quality work from a trusted contractor is rare, and can usually be avoided through proper screening and qualification of your team. Good workers are almost always going to be consistently good, and people generally improve at what they do over time. However, exceptions do occur in special circumstances.
If a new contractor submits poor quality work, simply dump the contractor and continue searching for the right one. Hopefully, this will happen during the trial project and not during a critical engagement. If a proven, trusted contract begins submitting sub-par work, however, you have to consider several things before making a decision about how to proceed:
- Is the contractor under particularly heavy load, a stressful deadline, or an unusually challenging project?
- Is the contractor burnt-out?
- Are you paying enough for this project?
- Were your instructions clear?
- Is the contractor busy with other work?
- Is the contractor sub-contracting your work to another vendor?
- Is the contractor having personal problems?
An occasional lapse in quality or isolated incident is usually worth overlooking in the interests of fostering an ongoing relationship. Confront your contractor and simply inform them that the work was of poor quality and needs to be fixed immediately. If they comply and there aren’t any further problems, you are probably wise to forget the whole thing. If it turns into an ongoing problem, you’ll need to start looking for new people.
Don’t forget that this kind of thing goes both ways, and you may look to your contractor to help you out in an emergency situation, or to bail you out of a mess with an important client. A little patience goes a long way and is usually better than finding someone new.