Managing expectations - Keep everyone happy

Managing delivery expectations is an art that is generally only learnt from experience.

While you can read all you want about project management and production management, until you've been through the mill a few times with a project process you'll still either be overly cautious or blatantly over sell a delivery.

An essential part in the process of delivery is establishing a clear definition of what's actually going to be delivered, when it's going to be delivered and how much it's going to cost.

While in the initial stages of a project or pitch process the temptation might be to promise the world just to get the project started or to win the business, you must try at all costs to avoid doing so.

No one will benefit from promising the world and then delivering far less. You're much better off managing delivery expectations from the start and then delivering on those expectations.

To this end, initial conversations are best kept to a slightly controlled regiment. These initial conversation should have less "we could do this and do this, and we could add more of these" and have more "we'll look into what work is required to deliver that and come back to you with some more ideas".

You might need to coach other staff about this before you attending client meetings. Developers and designers can get excited (as they should) about delivering particular aspects of a project and start the expectation building themselves, leaving you to recover the damage later.

Not promising the world will allow you to go away and have a good look at what's need, check out any interdependencies and come back with a thought out suggested plan of action. Avoiding any ambiguity between what's been promised and then what's finally delivered.

This doesn't mean you can't suggest ideas to get people thinking about what you could possibly do for them, just avoiding getting too specific in the initial meeting.

Try and arrange a later meeting that will allow you to go through ideas in greater detail after you've taken the time to work out what works involved in developing the idea.

It's often hard to avoid doing this in initial meetings, particularly if the work looks exciting or if the client's a favourite client (I'm sorry, but we all have these, they're just national secrets!).

But if this is a project that looks exciting, or a particularly good client, then there's all the more reason to ensure you deliver on expectations and ensure the relationship grows in strength.

In order to achieve this accurate understanding of a client requirement, use the initial meetings or conversations to extract as much information as you can from the client.

This should have a two fold effect. It should, with the right questions, get the excitement of the new projects delivery possibilities fired up with your client. Without you putting any specifics out there about what your going to deliver, you can get a client asking for what you might have envisage delivering.

Having them ask you to provide functionality or design alterations takes the responsibility away from you to deliver on original plans and puts it back with them as a change of requirements. Hopefully a change or addition that you thought was going to best for the project anyway.

This allows you to deliver your solution honestly, with the highest degree of transparency. No one is in the dark over what's been promised and then what's delivered. There's been a proper scoping discussion to establish requirements.

You've also created the time to go away and investigate what's going to be required to complete the work; and if it's going to be possible within any previously defined time plans and their related costs.

So next time you're in with your favourite client and they ask for suggestions about larger pieces of work, rather than go into great detail about what you might do, give them some basic ideas to think about and then go away and scope the work properly.

Come back to them with a realistic review of what can be done and realistic estimates of how long it will take to complete the work and if there are any additional costs associated.

It should leave you with a happy client and a happy delivery team, everyone knows what's expected of them and when it's expected.


Related reading:

Communication Brief - The initial project definition - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/05/communication-brief-initial-project.html

Have you got time? - Project managing time - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/04/have-you-got-time-project-managing-time.html

Communicate and define - Basic rules of any project - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/03/communicate-and-define-basic-rules-of.html

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