I recently read an article geared towards the creation of freelance contracts, something that I spend a lot of time researching. A good contract is of utmost importance not only to your success as a freelancer but to the success of each individual project.
On thing that struck me in this article was the suggestion for the inclusion of a section that deals with how you will handle and charge for any issues caused by third party contributions to the project. By third party I mean designers/developers that are hired by your client to develop certain smaller parts of the project. The ‘third party’ developers were not chosen or approved by you as the lead designer/developer on the project.
While I will not go into the benefits of being given the freedom to choose your own trusted sub-contractors, or at least the right to approve those chosen, I will give an example situation.
Let us say that you are working on a project, you are for the most part the project lead. You are doing the majority of design and development work as a freelancer. Your client wishes to include certain specialty ‘add-ons’ in the project and has already contacted a developer that will take the lead on these add-ons.
A few weeks the add ons are packed and shipped to you for inclusion to the site. Upon opening the scripts involved and installing them you begin to notice certain issues with them.
At the very least the add ons do not validate according to your coding standards and are written in outdated code. With add ons that do not validate you are left with an entire project that does not validate, something which is important to you. Basically this means that you are faced with a decision to either fix the code or release a project that is not up to your standard. Obviously the second option could be detrimental to your reputation as a designer/developer.
However validating the code will take a considerable amount of time, time that was not planned for in the overall estimate of the project.
Without a clause in the contract that addresses a situation similar to this you are stuck having to make the decision to eat the cost or release work that is below your standards.
You are also in a bind to extend the timeline should it require a considerable amount of time to make the fixes. Neither scenario is something that your client is going to want to hear.
While some clients will be understanding of the situation given that you have taken the time to explain, you are better protected to negotiate this type of extra if you have addressed it in the contract.
Personally I would prefer to choose or at the very least sign off on any sub-contractors or add ons for the project. However if the decision has been made and the outside additions to the project adversely effect the quality or implementation of the project I would require that I be compensated for any additional work associated with fixing the situation.
Obviously if you do choose the sub-contractor or add-ons for inclusion in the project and things go badly you will be taking responsibility. Unless perhaps you are a smooth talker.