Client: Installed. Mostly.
ok. It's done. Mostly. My main client now has a new version of her big labor-saving software package installed and configured. The only problem is that there are bugs.

It's only natural that there would be bugs. Of course bugs happen when you go on long hiatuses fairly often. Long ago, I committed never to leave the site in a permanently damaged condition, so I'm going to fix these bugs.

Now here's what I love about my client: We talk about the bugs rationally. She gives me screenshots and tells me what she expected and what actually happened. What she did. What other people did. And somehow, it's all always relevant. She doesn't pretend to know what's going on under the hood, so she doesn't try to solve the problem and make it worse. She just explains what's going on, with full faith that I'll quickly make it right, which I do.

If I didn't mention, the project is a web site. It's not just any old web site, though. She manages the web systems for a school. Way back years ago, our intrepid web designer (she) got a cool job at a private (and really good) religious school in a place where the cows really do come home. With Dreamweaver in hand, she ran the site as well as she knew how, but was constantly backlogged with requests to evolve the web site.

My relationship with this client has always been symbiotic. I heard through a mutual frient that she was having trouble with the workload, so I approached her with a simple request to see her way of working. Without criticising, I simply observed for a while, and then said that I would come up with something which I thought she would like. She happened to be in the midst of a site re-design at the time, so it was the perfect opportunity to insert some new technology.

Soon afterward, I gave her a demonstration of a little tool I had come up with. I matched her web site pixel for pixel, but I did it within a relatively sophisticated content management framework. She was thrilled with the system, mainly because of two things:

1. It eliminated all of her multiple-maintenance headaches, as now every page had consistent menus and links and such.
2. It eliminated HTML completely, in favor not of a graphical editor, but rather of a super-simplified markup that any monkey could learn.

Between these two characteristics, she essentially never wrote another line of HTML. She will occasionally twiddle the menus, which are raw HTML chunks, but for the most part she can delegate responsibility out to the people who know what they want to publish, and those people are unable to screw the site up.

Her workload vanished overnight.

You can be sure that she became a faithful customer. In fact, she was so happy with the new system that she grew a 20-page site to well over 600 pages in the space of a few years. You can't manage that without automated tools, and I was there to provide them.

Naturally, with her new-found powers, my client also found new and creative ways to be frustrated. We never could have predicted in advance what would later seem the limiting factor in getting her home early on Fridays. Over time, we've talked about and implemented a few new features, and each time it makes lots of people in her organization really happy to have hired her.

If there's a moral to the story, I think it's this: You can only really know a client's needs when you've walked a few dozen miles in her mocassins. The next best thing is to develop a solid trusting relationship. Communicate openly and respectfully, and completely accept each other. Recognize that you are ignorant of her needs, and seek genuinely to understand. And never suffer a bug to live.