When a Project Stalls Because of You

The uncomfortable statistic

Among small website projects that run late, the majority are waiting on the client rather than on the supplier.

That is not a criticism of clients. The supplier does this every day and has a process; the client is doing it once, alongside running a business, and the tasks fall to whoever has the least excuse to refuse them.

What makes it damaging is that it is invisible from the client side. The supplier goes quiet because they are blocked, the client interprets silence as the supplier being slow, and both sides are waiting.

What clients are usually blocking

• Content: by a wide margin the most common.
• Photographs, or permission to use them.
• Feedback on a design that needs internal agreement.
• A decision nobody wants to make alone.
• Access: to hosting, the domain, or an existing system.
• Someone else's input, from an accountant or a supplier.

The first accounts for most stalled projects, and the fourth is the one that takes longest because nobody has authority to end it.

Why content stalls

Worth understanding rather than treating as a failure of will.

Writing about your own business is genuinely hard, harder than most people expect, and it is a task with no deadline pressure attached because nobody outside is waiting visibly.

It also has no natural stopping point. There is always a better way to phrase the about page, so the draft is never finished, and unfinished work is easy to postpone.

And it competes with paid work, which always wins.

Recognising it as a genuinely difficult task rather than an admin item changes how it gets handled, because the response to a hard task is to buy help or reduce it, not to try harder next week.

Notice it early

The signals are consistent and they appear before the project is properly late.

A supplier's updates become shorter and less frequent.

Two weeks pass with nothing to look at.

The same item appears on three consecutive status messages.

Or you find yourself avoiding a reply because you have not done the thing it will ask about, which is the clearest signal available and the one nobody acts on.

If any of those is true, ask directly: what are you waiting for from us, and what is the effect of the delay so far.

Give a real date

The most useful thing a blocked client can do, and it is not to promise sooner.

An optimistic date that is missed twice is worse than a realistic one that is met, because the supplier plans capacity around what you tell them.

If the content will take six weeks because you can only work on it on Sundays, say six weeks.

The supplier can then schedule other work and return, rather than holding time open and losing it.

Most suppliers respond well to an honest longer date and badly to three short ones in a row, and the second pattern is what damages the relationship.

A worked example

A project quoted at eight weeks reached week twenty-six.

The build had been finished in week seven. Everything since had been waiting for content for eleven pages and a decision about which of two service structures to use.

The owner had been writing the pages in evenings and had completed three.

They stopped, worked out that the remaining eight would take another four months at that rate, and paid a writer to interview them for two hours and produce the drafts.

The drafts arrived in nine days, the owner edited them in an afternoon, and the site launched three weeks later.

The writing cost a fraction of the project and had been the entire blocker for four months.

Their assessment afterwards was that they had not been avoiding the work. They had been unable to fit it into weeks that were already full, which no amount of intention was going to change.

Reduce the scope instead

The alternative when buying help is not an option.

A site that launches with eight pages and grows to fourteen is live, working, and producing enquiries five months earlier than one waiting for all fourteen.

Decide which pages are genuinely required for launch, which is usually fewer than the plan says, and move the rest to a second phase.

Nothing about a website requires it to arrive complete, and the belief that it does is what keeps projects in a drawer.

Suppliers are almost always willing to launch a reduced scope, because a live site is better for them too.

Fix the approval bottleneck

The other common blocker and a different remedy.

Where feedback is delayed because several people need to agree, name one person who decides.

Collect input from everybody, in writing, by a stated date, and let the named person resolve conflicts rather than seeking consensus.

Consensus on a design is not achievable, and pursuing it is how a project loses six weeks to a discussion about a colour.

The named person does not need to be the most senior. They need to be available and willing to decide.

The counter-case

Not every delay is the client's, and assuming it is has its own cost.

Some suppliers go quiet for reasons of their own and are content to let an ambiguous silence be attributed to the client, particularly when they have taken on too much work.

The way to tell is to ask specifically what is outstanding from your side and to check whether the answer changes each time.

If you supply what was asked for and nothing moves, the blockage was not yours.

There is also a category of delay that is nobody's fault: an integration that turns out to be harder than expected, or a third party who does not respond. Those need re-planning rather than blame.

Getting it moving

1. Ask what is outstanding from your side, in writing.
2. Ask what the delay has cost so far.
3. Give a realistic date, not an optimistic one.
4. If content is the blocker, buy help or cut scope.
5. Name one person to approve, and stop seeking consensus.
6. Launch with fewer pages and add later.
7. Book a fixed weekly slot for your part of the work.

Step four resolves most stalled projects and is the step people delay longest, because it involves admitting the writing is not going to happen.

The mirror image is covered in when your supplier cannot give you a date.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.