Key components of project communication - Illustrator Tutorial

There will be a couple of questions in the exam always about project management and you have to be familiar with a couple of important terms so let's just discuss these. First of all, you need to know the three key components of project communication. The first is the project scope, then the due dates and then the third one is the possible impacts of delays. We already mentioned having a brief for a project that's essentially what you need for getting the project scope documented and make sure that everyone agrees what are the deliverables that the designer has to produce and what are the expectations from the client. Now when it comes to this topic one term I know it will always come up in the exam and that is the scope creep. So scope creep in graphic design refers to the gradual and often unapproved expansion of a project's goals, deliverables or requirements beyond the original agreement and it usually happens when clients request additional revisions, assets or features that weren't part of the initial brief and it happens more often than not that the client would do these things without adjusting the timeline, the budget or contract. So obviously scope creep is something you want to avoid and that is why documentation and clear communication between all the team members and the client is crucial. It applies to pretty much any type of project management but it's true also for graphic design. So a very typical scenario for scope creep is when an individual, a freelancer working remotely for a client and they agree on the initial terms but maybe the brief is a bit vague on some aspects and then after the designer delivering the work that they were expected to create the client would request repeated rounds of minor tweaks that will turn into hours or maybe even days or weeks of unpaid work. Unfortunately this can happen to anyone even if you're familiar with the term and even if you know how you should manage a project. If you are on your own and if you have a new client that you don't know how to work with or how to manage a project together with then you can also easily end up suffering from scope creep. So the main problem is not just that you will be overworked and you will be frustrated because you will be working on things that were not agreed in the beginning but it can also strain the relationship between you and your client. Mainly because anything that wasn't discussed or agreed on in the beginning will lead to lots of question marks and unclear expectations and it just makes things confusing. So the way we prevent this to happen is that we always set clear project scope and deliverables in writing. It's highly recommended to always have signed contracts between the parties and in case the client wants to have a a couple of rounds of revisions that should also be agreed on in the beginning like limit the amount of revisions that you will allow and that should be already considered when you set your rate or the price for the project. So if you allow the client two or three rounds of revisions you should consider how much time that is going to take and if you get compensated for it then there won't be any frustration. There's also another term called change order which again another signed document that you can have between you and the client whenever they request additional changes that were not agreed on in the beginning or maybe if they change their mind about a crucial part of the project like the direction they want to change for these again it's good to have documentation which you can easily refer back at any time if push comes to shove and the client is not happy with something these things like the change order will always support and protect you. Now for due dates there's lots of different tools that you can use like Google Spreadsheets, you can use Notion, Monday and there's so many other tools out there especially if you have a team it's even more important to keep track of everyone's work and what and when they are supposed to deliver. So here's a simple example from our team the way we manage the publication and advertisement of video tutorials that we publish on YouTube. It has a simple weekly timeline, it also has the tasks broken down and assigned to team members and there's a clear indication of the status of each of those tasks. For the exam it's important to also know the term Gantt chart and that is simply just another visual representational method for tracking the tasks and also the deadlines. And you can also be asked a question about what's a critical path analysis or critical path method. This is another visual planning technique which can identify the sequence of dependent tasks that directly impact the project's completion. Both of these methods are useful like with the Gantt charts just coming back to them it's easy to visualize the timelines and how the tasks overlap and again depend on each other and there is no right or wrong way to manage the due dates as long as there is some kind of tracking method you are using and you are sharing with everyone involved in the project. Last but not least the third key component of project communication would be the possible impacts of delays. So it's very important to recognize any potential bottlenecks such as limited resources like a single graphic designer working on multiple projects and also client availability for approvals. So even if you are the designer and you deliver your work on time but you obviously need to get feedback on it and based on that feedback you have to progress further if you don't check the client's availability in advance and maybe the client won't be available to look at the work for a week or two then of course that is going to delay everything and you might not feel like it's your fault that the client wasn't available to give feedback but usually what this leads to is that again you will have limited time for the revision that you have to do and there is another term for this called feedback loop which means the entire process of you the designer sending your work for review, the client looking at the work, reviewing it and sending the feedback back to you and then you again the designer looking at that feedback and trying to address it and make the changes. So that would be considered one feedback cycle and each of these cycles for instance could have a separate version name like version 1, version 2, version 3 and it's best to also maybe create separate subfolders within your main project folder where you're storing all the deliverables and files for the project.