I am working as a contractor for a company that asked me to take on a very small ($2500) engagement for an existing client. Should be a no brainer right, its just a small change order, the customer is already up and running and on paper the job looks easy – two days worth of work tops!! You can probably guess where the story goes from here . . .famous last words right.
Well it turns out that the person running the project on the client side has only been with the company 3 months, doesn’t understand CRM and doesn’t understand his new companies processes outside of his own duties. To sweeten the pot, the two Partners that signed the check for the project don’t want to be involved in defining the solution they paid my client to build. This is a recipe for disaster and at the kick off meeting the hair on my neck stood up. Nobody owns the solution, no one in the room understands what they currently have AND they are offended that I am asking questions about their business process because they put it all down in a spreadsheet and gave it to the person that sold them the Change Order.
Well the project ended up taking about 4 times longer than expected, it was flat fee so it very unprofitable for my client and the next phase in the project is for the customer to review it internally and see if they want to keep any of it. So they are going to take a solution they don’t really understand and compare against the old solution that they don’t understand to see if it really improves anything. I wish I had more time . . .
It is easy for everyone to stand up and say it’s the customers fault. If they want more work they should pay more money . . it’s not our fault that their system was not being used and was throwing errors all over the place when someone tried. It is not our fault that the customer chose to implement a solution with so many gaping holes in the sales process that it would never work. I like to remember the original definition of the word client in mud slinging situations like this one, ”under one’s care”. The client is actually quite happy with the work I did for them which is good, but it was a bad project. To call it anything different would be a lie. The solution is less useful than it could have been with some participation and my client lost money.
The moral I think is . . . when you see or hear a “yellow light” in a conversation with a customer or prospect slow down and explore until you are sure you are on the same page – this is especially important before money changes hands. Once you take their money you don’t get to blame them when the exact things you were worried about blow up in your face!
