Guest Blogger Immanuel Bryant ’14
It’s difficult to work with someone who is working. Whether they are working on something for themselves or for someone else seems to be irrelevant to a writer…until our work depends on them working with us.
The complexity of the previous paragraph depicts the situation I have faced working with my client this semester in CUPID Studio. My work group and I made a contract addressing how we could make our client’s desired product. We also wrote what we would need from our client to complete the deliverable. Yet as the deliverable developed we needed more information from our client to complete it; and this is when things became tricky.
The fact that our work depended on the client working with us became self-evident when we could not work on the deliverable without the client’s information. The pressure of meeting the deadlines we put in the contract and abiding by the schedule of events we gave to our client began to slip away due to our inability to meet each other’s needs and to communicate effectively.
When working with clients it is important for both the writer and the client to acknowledge the interdependence between their communication and their communication’s impact on the deliverable. In the development of our deliverable we requested that our client send us information that should be in the final product. The information was sent to us between four and five days after we requested it. Working with the information and negotiating goals or standards with our client was also a challenge.
As I reflect on other information that our client had given us, I began to realize that our client was busy, very busy. So much so that we had little to no time to communicate with things that weren’t immediate concerns. Upon realizing this, I encouraged my work group to be more self-reliant. This way, we could show our client our work, the information that is missing in the deliverable, gain client feedback on sample documents, and have information sent to us according to what was missing from the sample document.
Though my group may not have the originally planned deliverable product for our client (due to miscommunication and a lack of information) we will have a completed template for our client to input information when time is available. From working with this client I have learned that, as a writer, when your work depends on the working situation of another person it is best to take that into consideration when deciding how much work you can do.
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