Burn Your Portfolio: Stuff they don’t teach you in design school, but should

85. “No Charge” Doesn’t Mean “Free”

At the end of 2009, my company green lit our biggest single-dollar project ever. Eight long months later, we were dealing with the biggest project disaster in our company’s history. We worked with the client through changing scope and shifting ideas, rolling with the punches all along. After receiving the green light, we submitted changes and restarted the project three times. Each of these times required us to rewrite the proposal, and resulted in us making the decision to eat the work we had completed on previously green-lit elements that were no longer part of the client’s strategy moving forward.

Finally, the client requested the fourth change in scope, this time attempting to cut the project in half based ...