An Agency Bill of Rights

This is a follow up to the Client Bill of Rights post from last week. The main purpose of this companion document is to explain to the client that they are also active participants in their project and are in many ways just as responsible for its success or failure.

The vast majority of our projects are “successful” in the sense that they are completed and launched. Some go on to win awards, others don’t. That’s the nature of the business. But every once in a while we have a project that fails (for us it’s about once every couple of years, which we think is a pretty good track record). Still, we hate when this happens: it means we’ve wasted our time and the client’s, it means our process for vetting was not successful, and it means that we didn’t follow our own guidelines.

So in these cases, when we go back and look at the project as a system and identify the elements that caused the failure, the culprit is always the same. It’s never the technology, or the design. It’s always the people: it’s the relationships and the communications.

That’s why we think these two documents are valuable. When successful, they set expectations at the beginning of a project, rather than waiting to course correct after something goes wrong.

Here then is the Agency Bill of Rights:

Download a PDF version of the Agency Bill of Rights

Did we miss anything? And have you had similar experiences as a member of an agency or a client? If so we’d like to hear about them.