Rocks into Gold

Clarke Ching – whose work I’ve been reading for a while, is preparing to publish a short parable for these troubled times. Get in touch with him via this post, and grab a copy, after all the more weapons in our armoury, the better chance we have of winning the inevitable battles.

I want problems, not solutions!

So, there I was, quietly listening into a conference call between a couple of clients on one side, and the account manager, project manager and me on the other.

We were going through a small project that we’d just completed for the purposes of getting sign-off. We had built in the functionality they wanted, using the designs that they’d agreed to, so it was plain sailing.

And then the spanner.

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A grown-up conversation

Several places I’ve worked have spoken about the client in two contrasting ways: one, hushed tones suggesting that they’re too sensitive to handle whatever reality we’re dealing with; two, derision suggesting that they’re too much of an idiot to understand whatever reality we’re dealing with.

Both are clearly untrue (to greater or lesser degrees), and both serve to make our jobs harder because they distance us from the most important person in any project.

So here’s a list of questions I would like answered:

• why do we keep secrets from clients?
• why are we so keen to promise tight deadlines?
• why do we try to squeeze in extra stuff for them?
• what if we treat them as part of the team?
• what if we made them fully aware of the repercussions of their decisions?
• what if we made demands of them, in order to deliver
• what if we explain how risk builds up, and what they can do to mitigate it?

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Finding out what’s best …

Just doing our best ain’t good enough – we need to be more savvy than that and work out precisely what’s the best thing to do first. So far, we’ve identified the conflict, and we now need to assess possible solutions.

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