Use Milestones For Projects

Just as you pay hourly workers on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, so too should you pay project based workers periodically during a project.  Negotiate with your worker before a project starts and establish milestones for their work rather than paying in a single lump sum at the project’s conclusion.  These milestones should be more than just particular deadline dates; there should be certain pre-specified deliverables due at each deadline date along with worker payment paid that’s commensurate with the amount of work they’ve accomplished between each milestone.

Working with milestones helps ensure each phase of the project is completed correctly before moving on to the next phase.  The last thing you want is a multi phase project being completed without any ongoing review and feedback and having problems in multiple places.  This will tend to slow down a project a lot.  Many of these problems may have been avoided if they’d been addressed and corrected on an ongoing basis in the earlier phases of the project.

Paying in milestones also helps you salvage a project if a worker abandons you and the project.  If you have a 5 phase project and they abandon it after completing phase 2 at least you’ll have that much work done and delivered.  If the project didn’t have milestones and nothing was to be delivered until the entire project was completed then you may lose all the completed work if the worker disappears and never returns.

This is why it’s particularly important to work with a freelancer site where a deposit is required from the worker before work commences.  If this is a long and/or difficult project considered raising the value of the total project deposit to 20% or more (the norm is 10%-15%).  Requiring a large deposit is a strong incentive for workers to complete the project on time.  It’s also a strong deterrent to any unqualified or overbooked workers from even bidding on your project.