Establishing Objects and Gaining Conceptual Agreement with the Client
Posted by Brad EgelandI’m taking a little turn from purely project management concepts and thinking more in terms of the IT Consultant in general. Afterall, many of us working as project managers are at any given time part of a professional services organization that thinks of us basically as consultants to THEIR clients.
Establishing objectives is the starting point of any consulting project. It’s impossible to do anything else until and unless you know the desired ending point. Below are some specific questions to discuss with the client in order to elicit some outcome-based business objectives. Take them with you whenever you sit down with a client or potential client as you work through that initial meeting both selling your services and diving deeper into their need and expected results.
- How would conditions ideally improve as a result of this project?
- Ideally, what would you (the client) like to accomplish?
- What would be the difference in the organization if the project is successful?
- How would your customer (the client’s customer) be better served by this project?
- What is the impact you seek on return on investment/equity/sales/assets?
- What is the impact you seek on shareholder value?
- What is the market share/profitability/productivity improvement expected?
- How will you (the client) be evaluated in terms of the results of the project?
- How would your (the client’s) boss recognize the improvement?
- How would employees notice the difference?
- What precise aspects are most troubling to you – what keeps you up at night?
- What are the top three priorities to be accomplished?
In establishing conceptual agreement about the objectives of the project you are about to undertake together, you – as the consultant – are trying to ensure the following:
- The client is not expecting anything that you cannot deliver to them.
- The client is not expecting anything that is unreasonable under the circumstances and is not within the culture and environment that the project will be performed in.
- There will be no misunderstanding later about why additional work wasn’t performed. The limits and goals of the project will be understood and agreed upon.
- The client is maximizing your contribution and talents on the project so that the project is as effective as possible for the client and as lucrative as possible for you.
If you begin with carefully constructed objectives, you can then create a framework within which the project can be launched. From that, the project can progress toward the agreed upon goals and final solution and draw to a close. Boundaries can be derived from clear objectives. While it seems that a never-ending project is lucrative for you, it actually is not. If the end is never reached, then success is possibly never really understood and realized. Setting clear goals and reaching them is what leads to future work with the same client, not a seemingly ongoing project that drains their financial resources.
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