What to ask your agency about rebuilding versus refreshing

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on rebuilding versus refreshing, these questions are worth asking early.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A rebuild is not always the answer. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Rebuild when the platform blocks what you need to do. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about rebuilding versus refreshing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A rebuild is not always the answer — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.