What does that even mean?
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In Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movie series, the idea of an unwritten “Pirate Code” is brought up frequently by characters. This typically stems from arguments about whether the Code should be strictly interpreted as hard rules or read more akin to guidelines. The character bringing up the matter usually wants to interpret the Code in whatever way is most advantageous to themselves at the moment. This same sort of situation can arise with clients (hopefully minus the swordplay and pillaging). Words can be slippery, and it’s important to manage projects with that recognition if you want a good outcome for everyone.
Every project you work on will have some number of competing demands and constraints placed on it. The client wants the best possible work for a reasonable cost. Your company wants satisfied customers who make your company a profit at the end of the day. You want to do work that is interesting and satisfying and makes you money at the end of the day. But what is “a reasonable cost?” What determines if a customer is “satisfied?” It takes hard work to bring these words into alignment between you and the client and keep them there over the course of a business engagement.
Today, we’re going to review four tools to build shared understanding with your clients in a way that is more likely to bring clarity, agreement, and positive outcomes for everyone.
Understanding the client’s desires
When I said clients want a “reasonable cost,” I wasn’t referring only to money. Beyond the financial cost, clients are required to provide other resources to the project. Time spent by their employees on the project necessarily takes them away from other responsibilities. Training staff on new or changed features requires planning and preparation. Business processes and internal budgets may require attention and reevaluation.
It may be that the client asked you for a complicated rocket ship, but their resources (budget, staff, time) only support a hang glider. You’ll need to gauge this on a case-by-case basis. You’ll also need to listen carefully to the client and ask questions that will help you determine the client’s constraints. You might learn, for example, that the client has employees with available time but is otherwise working against a rapidly approaching deadline. In that case, it may be worth de-prioritizing work on a fancy feature that would reduce labor in the long-term but would demand excessive time or resources in the near-term.
You’ll also need to determine who has the authority to make decisions for the client. Sometimes the team on calls with you simply doesn’t have the ability to determine a path forward. Sometimes there are too many decision makers on a call who can’t agree. Managing clarity around decision-making will help to keep things on schedule and reduce your stress at having to build, rebuild, and tweak endlessly.
If you run into a situation where there are clearly differing opinions on the client side, it’s good to gently call that out and ask them to resolve it before you continue. “It sounds like you could use some additional time to discuss this internally. When would be a good time to come back to this point?”
Finally, it’s important to determine what your client actually wants and needs. There may be a well-defined Statement of Work or other authoritative source. Many times this works great. There are other times when the client team that hired you is different than their implementation team. There are times when a manager doesn’t really understand what their team needs to be successful, or their situation has changed in the time between the sales process and onboarding. In those moments, building an awesome wrong thing is still the wrong thing. Part of your role as a consultant is to deeply understand the client’s needs and alert them to needed discussions when there’s a mismatch between their stated and underlying goals.
Managing Expectations
Both you and the client bring lots of assumptions to the table. Everyone has different ideas about responsiveness, responsibilities, and boundaries. The potential for miscommunication and conflict goes way up if you’re not clear on the expectations for your team and for the client. While many clients will be what you feel is “reasonable,” some will not (and they might feel the same about you).
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You’ll need to determine your boundaries. Some clients expect you to jump at every whim. Sometimes you might feel you have to jump on every client whim even if they haven’t demanded it. It’s possible to overdo the people-pleasing aspects or be unresponsive to client needs. You’ll need to evaluate the sweet spot regularly. Consider the client’s ultimate goals, your other clients and responsibilities, and your available resources. Being a people-pleaser for one needy client will take away resources for your other clients (risking more problems down the road). Also, ignoring problematic clients won’t make them go away. Strive to be clear in your assumptions and expectations with clients in a polite and professional manner.
Clients need their expectations set too. You need them to show up to meetings, provide relevant data, answer your questions in a timely manner, and generally be useful to have a successful outcome. This is especially important early in an engagement. If a client gets used to being late on their responsibilities (for example, delivering needed data), it may back you against a wall or cause ripple delays in the project. It’s in the client’s best interest for you to keep them accountable by setting expectations. This will help reduce your stress and provide better outcomes for your client.
Finally, make sure you build realistic margin into your timelines for yourself and for the client. Airlines do this by padding your arrival time to later than they expect the plane to actually arrive. They know you’ll feel much better about being slightly “ahead of schedule” than “landing a few minutes late.” Becoming overly optimistic or feeling pressured to hit an earlier-than-realistic deadline is a recipe for poor results and conflict. Make notes of when your assumptions and timelines were unrealistic (both too much or too little) and use that to better inform your next tasks or projects with proper margin.
Dealing in Reality
You don’t need to solve every client problem live on a call. Some problems are going to be trivial for your skills and can be handled live. Some problems are clearly so large they will take extensive time and discussion to resolve. In between those extremes, it can be tempting to take on an in-the-moment solution. Snap decisions and quick work can work – sometimes. Other times you’ve inadvertently given the client sub-optimal advice or added technical debt to a project that you’ll regret later.
Be honest. Clients are usually quite understanding and even encouraged when you say, “I think this is a quick solution. But I want to think it over for a few minutes after this call to make sure it’s a good solution, not just a quick one.” You and the client will be grateful every time you spend that time and catch a mistake or pitfall.
Additionally, use your Statement of Work to keep grounded. Tangents and feature creep can sneak up on you and pull you off-track. This can be especially important when you have hard deadlines or limited engagement time. Work to keep the client focused on their stated outcomes and don’t let them get distracted. Distraction leads to being spread too thin. Delivering ten extra broken/unfinished features probably isn’t better than having a smaller number of originally specified features in working order.
Prioritizing
When you’re dealing in reality, it will be easier to see when there aren’t enough resources to do everything. Some clients are excited and eager to do everything all at once. They see the potential in your solutions and have a vision for their business becoming better. Or they may be approaching the problem with a shotgun approach – hoping that if they try everything that something will work. That’s when you need to put on your consulting hat and help them prioritize what is most important. ?
This can be as simple as, “Which of these things would you like us to work on first?” The goal is to help your client determine what will provide the best return on investment with the resources (time, money, whatever) available to them. Your expertise comes from recognizing the constraints and guiding the client through the clarifying process. Your clients will appreciate the increased focus and be more confident that they’re making progress. You will appreciate not juggling more balls than can be realistically juggled at one time.
One last note on priorities: write down or otherwise record the client’s decisions and make sure they’re available to everyone. Both you and the client are very busy, and you need a guidepost to look back on to remember decisions that were made previously. This will keep you from getting off track and prevent stressful disagreements about focus or priorities in the future.
Try it Out
Try it out and let me know your experiences with building shared understanding with your clients. If you have other techniques you use to engage clients, I’d love to hear your stories and tips as well! Most of all, please share this with your other introverted consultant friends (from a comfortable distance and without judgment, as we like it). Consulting can be a rewarding career, and there are great tools out there to make it more comfortable for us introverts as well.