I am glad that we aren’t the only agency that has this problem! We often encounter this both from a design and from a development poiint of view. To give you an example a PR agency, who were ‘project managing’ the build of a client’s new website, brought us in to actually do all the work (for 40% of the total fee…). They wanted us to produce three or four initial designs and whn we refused, citing the design process we go through to get to that stage, they said it would harm our chances. A standalone freelancer was happy to do several days work for free and ended up getting the job ahead of us, this was 8 months ago and there still isn’t a new web site up. They still have their teletubby-esqe (I kid you not) web design up, I dread to think how much business the client is losing out on as a result. Very frustrating as we had put a lot of work into our intital proposal!

I do find Dave’s comment interesting, although projects are organic, we really liek to nail down the spec from the off as we hate scope creep!