How to Handle Client Revisions Without Scope Creep?

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m a freelance web developer, and I often face issues with clients requesting too many revisions beyond the agreed scope. I want to keep them happy but also need to protect my time and project deadlines.

How do you politely manage revision requests while keeping projects on track?

Thanks!

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It comes down to contracts and getting a clear agreement on what will and will not be done for the duration of them.

My contracts when I was freelancing used to spell out:

  • responsible parties
    • who provided content
    • who provided logo/color schemes
    • who procured hosting/url registrations
  • timelines for deliverables and payments required at deliverables.
    • this included wireframes/mockups which showed basic look first
    • each deliverable.allowed for x revisions and/or a max time for those revisions.
  • agreement on maintenance after final delivery
    • x number of revisions post implementation within n months
    • maintenance costs ($/hr) after number of revisions were reached or revision period expired.

Of course, I almost always estimated high on costs and hours and “over delivered” by coming in earlier and cheaper, but the contracts covered me when they did go wrong.

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3

If you have an “agreed scope”, which is presumably documented, then you’re ahead of many folks. It seems the polite way to handle this is “This revision is completely doable, at a cost of $X, and slip of X-weeks in the schedule. Let me know if you’d like to modify the project scope to include it”. I would only keep the project on schedule if it was clear to me that this revision would easily fit into the previous schedule.

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