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Creating, or being part of a creative process is rarely a seamless activity. There are a number of factors that can make or break a project – particularly when there are numerous people involved in the process. Web Design and Development is one of the areas I have gained reasonable experience in, especially working with others to deliver a product. Throughout this experience I have worked with designers of all skill levels, different people liasing with clients, adapted existing sites into content management systems and designed for other developers. Each new project brings a new set of problems to solve in order to deliver the best result; however, here are my thoughts on what can help a project to run well when working with others.

Esentially, it all comes down to one point: every project has constraints

Each person involved in a project gets involved for different reasons. Maybe you are a designer with a keen eye for detail. Maybe you are a developer who values optimisation and clean code, or maybe you are a project manager who, at the end of the day, just wants the client to be happy. Not that all of these approaches are mutually exclusive, but generally everyone has a different focus. The key thing that determines which of these is dominant are the project constraints. Maybe its time, maybe its the budget – but theres always factors that determine how a project gets done, what gets cut and what makes it.

When working in a team during this process its crucial that everyone understands the constraints of a project, and understands the limitations and perspective of the other people in the team. Without this mutual understanding, projects can fall over or people leave disatisfied with the end result – something that no creative person likes.