Taking 'no' one step further
On Planet Drupal, there have been a number of posts lately about the difficulty project leaders and developers have in saying "no" while working on a project. As much as Project leaders want to please both their client and their team members, real leaders understand the responsibilities they have in saying "no". More specifically, I'm talking about Boris Mann's post, Susan Mernit on the role of "no" in product development as well as Laura Scott's own post You've got to know when to 'no' them .
This is all interesting to me because for some time I've wanted to talk about Aaron Mentele's post, Every once in a while you need to fire a client. Aaron Mentele is a web designer and co-owns a web design company based in Sioux Falls, SD.
There comes a time when most project leaders have mastered the the ability to say "no" to certain requests. But what happens if you find yourself not really saying "yes" to the client? Do you have it in yourself to recognize that by having to answer "no" so often in a project you likely shouldn't have taken on the project in the first place? What are you to do?
Mentele points out that first we have to recognize the criteria in accepting a project in the first place.
We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule. For a service provider, it means that unless you work to correct it, 80% of your problems come from 20% of your clients. And there are points in everyone’s timeline where it feels more like a 90/10 rule.
So how do you correct the ratio? Well, to start, you don't buy business. If you can't answer "yes" to at least two of the following qualifying questions, don't even consider the project.
- Will the project make you money?
- Will you enjoy working on it?
- Will it lead to more work?
So if you're about to start a project and you can't really say yes to two of those questions, decline the project. However, Aaron Mentele says that even he will mistakenly think he had two "yes" answers before taking on the project, but later find that you're sitting on "no" for two of the questions. What do you do?
Catering to long-term clients that don’t consistently provide you with two or more “yes” answers will hamstring your business. Fire them.
Now he doesn't give that advice for selfish reasons but because it makes good business sense. If you're spending more time on those few clients than you should, you are more than likely stealing away time and resources needed to keep the majority of your clients happy. Of course, that business relationship ending between you and the client isn't going to always be pretty, but sometimes those are the hard choices we have to make.
Solidarity sign
Getting pushed in the wrong direction by a misfit client is a bad feeling. I wish the advice wasn't based on professional experience - looking back, we lost a lot of time / revenue / quality of life to misfit work. Thanks for the link.
Connecting the dots
I had remembered reading a post on firing a bad client, but I'd not bookmarked it. Those three questions Aaron suggests are excellent. Simple and direct. Thanks to you both.
Oh man
After a set of extreme rush projects on increasingly short deadlines,which were obviously botched, and the shrinking scope of the project, initially intended to be a super cool community site/portal, developing into a rather lame 'innovation' wank-out with a series of lectures about what people might be able to do in the future (what most 14 year old council estate kids are doing daily with their phones), I'm thinking * sacked. It's a nice way of looking at it. You fire the client.
This was supposed to be the project of a lifetime, and was actually a load of grey hairs being amazed by not much, unable to see the wood for the trees, and scared of email, really.
Mind you, the people comissioning the project use Windows NT in their office, with a wall of paper files, and explorer like two or something, so what can you expect? The computer is still a glorified typewriter.
I tried to tell them that they could fit all of their paper files on a single triple redundant hard disc system with far more security, and find things instantly, but they didn't believe it.
Oh man and when it came to development... oh dear.
"DON'T YOU GIVE ME THAT TECHNICAL LINE, I WANT IT NOW!" Oh for gawd's sake, migrating the site from a test server to another server produces buggies. And I can't tell you how long they take to fix, because we don't know what they are!
And thinking that it is negligent of me to take 4 days redirecting the DNS. Oh man, how thoroughly upsetting. You do have to wait for the world's servers to update. It ain't TV you know.
They don't trust the possible, and they want the impossibly dumb, but way quicker than you should ever make something.
They think they'll have to pay for embedded video streaming (youtube?) but don't consider things like user experience, different login planes or search tools.
It's funny, but it's been a brief about creating an idiot proof administrator broadcast system, not a collaborative network for the man on the street.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! And a consultant CHARGED them for setting up a blogger.com site for them, with a "superior" CMS to the custom botched one we created in like two weeks flat, which was full of holes. Oh ho ho ho. I should really have never tried, and just set them up a myspace page, and claimed I made it.
FIRED.
Funny Story
Very funny story about about the blogger.com site. Reminds me of a time when growing up someone put an ad out for a cheap $99 clothes dryer that was "Environmentally friendly and energy efficient". What people ended up buying was a very expensive outdoor clothes line that you could buy for a few bucks.
By the way, I did a slight edit on your comment where you see the asterisk. I know you didn't intend to be offensive...mainly just some slight differences in the English language that might ruffle a few feathers on this side of the Atlantic. Hope you're OK with the edit and hope to see you back soon again.
-Bryan