Estimates, job orders, and other types of spec docs are an important part, and necessary evil, of agency work. They describe our services and frequently serve as binding contracts between us and our clients, so it’s important to spend time ensuring they’re clear, focused, and purposeful.
What’s the Purpose of a Spec Doc?
The main purpose of a spec doc is to describe, in great detail, what kind of work you’re going to do for your client. Anyone who’s worked for an agency knows how tricky achieving this kind of clarity can be, especially when you’re dealing with complicated development work or clients who need a little hand-holding to understand the web design/development process.
Transparency
At Blue Flavor, one of our primary goals is to achieve transparency. This goal infiltrates all phases of our process—right down to spec docs.
To ensure our spec docs are purposeful, clear, and transparent, we spend a lot of time with a magnifying glass, specifying the following:
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Phases: This one seems obvious, but it’s easy to mess up when you’re on auto-pilot. There is a big difference between, say, ‘content production’ and ‘content production strategy’ (one involves the actual production of content and the other involves a strategy for producing content), and we’re sure to point this out in our documentation.
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Deliverables: If we’re going to provide you with photoshop comps, we say it directly. We always end a phase (whether it’s IA, Visual Design, or Templates), with the words “final deliverables will include [number], [x, y, or z]-type files”.
- Rounds of revision: Since rounds of revision effect cost and measure how much input a client will have on a project, we’re always sure to specify them. We also spend time talking to our clients about what a round of revision involves and what kind of responsibility and time commitment it will entail on his/her end.
- Lead assignments: To keep our resourcing and scheduling in check, we almost always dedicate resources to a project well before it has begun. This allows us to plan internally, and sets the expectation that our clients will have an ongoing relationship with a specified member of our team. Similarly, we avoid switching resources mid-project unless we absolutely have to.
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Legal: We hate legal wrangling, but there’s no getting around the fact that the legal language in our spec docs has to be nearly airtight. We’re able to (slightly) adjust our legal language in certain situations, but we generally keep these types of iterations to a bare minimum.
Formatting
We treat spec docs as an extension of our marketing materials and pay close attention to how they’re formatted. We make sure that the look and feel of our spec docs is consistent with our branding and try to treat them as seriously as we do designed client work.
We also focus on describing our work in simple, clear language. And we protect our clients from having to wade through paragraph after paragraph of information, by avoiding paragraphs altogether (bullet points are better). Additionally, unless we’re forced to conform to RFP requirements, we limit our estimates and job orders to just a few pages. And of course, we always include a ‘bottom line’ cost and services break down that someone in a hurry can skip to if they want the big picture, right away.
The Bottomline
Spec docs aren’t the most exciting aspect of agency work, but they’re an important part of communicating well, achieving transparency, and gaining your clients’ trust. Describing your work clearly and in great detail will help clients feel safe that you’ll always tell them exactly what they’ll get, and at what cost.
