What Can We Do as a Client?

I haven't been posting to the blog lately because I have been on the road; hopefully bringing in new business along with expressing appreciation for existing business. But in any case, I have been in conversations with our clients. This is always valuable. Sitting in an office and listening to people that work in your own organization is easy, but deadly to our effectiveness as a project organization. If I don't get out, I soon start believing that everyone at ForeRunner grew up in Lake Woebegon.

One of our clients asked me a question that left me without much of an answer. The question was, "What can we do as a client to make our projects turn out better?" Talk about the opportunity to trot out the cliches! A masterful cliche user such as myself could have gone on for hours without really saying anything. And it is the safest course to not say anything to such a question, because we are of course treading on very dangerous ground. It is a question akin to one's wife asking if a certain dress makes her look fat. Those of us on both sides of the great divide know that an honest answer is neither wanted nor expected.

But being an engineer, I as well as my fellows, laugh at social norms and try to make an honest answer. That my wife is still with me after some 33 years is testimony to the essential grace of her character. However, clients are a different matter entirely. My answer to the client was that the client's culture dictated how projects were done in their own organization. Some client cultures lend themselves to doing projects more effectively than other client cultures. But the client culture is what the client culture is. Suggestions made by myself, or any other outsider, were of little use unless they were compatible with that client culture.

That is true enough, but not very helpful. ForeRunner is good at doing projects. If we are not, we wouldn't be in business, because that is what we do. If a client asks for advice about how to do projects, we should be able to offer more help. In that spirit, I would like to offer some of my perspective on how clients can be more effective at doing projects.

My answer to this client was true as far as it went. The client culture is all pervasive and immensely powerful. It is the environment within which projects will be done. Methodologies for improving project metrics will not work unless they are implemented in such a manner to mesh with that culture. But that is also the largest single opportunity for the client to improve their ability to effectively do projects.

Any outsider such as ForeRunner is necessarily outside that client culture and will consistently engage in actions that, while well intended, result in blunders when viewed from within that culture. In other words, we will consistently belch at the dinner table, simply because we do not realize that it is bad manners.

My experience of projects is that they are not graceful eagles flying majestically through their sky, but instead resemble wounded ducks. The competing requirements of the different client stakeholders make most projects awkward creatures even at their beginning. And after that beginning, the project's life is a long chain of compromise brought on by changes and discovery of unknown obstacles.

From my viewpoint, what many projects suffer from is the lack of a broader perspective from which to view the decisions that must be made in the course of a project. Projects with poor outcomes generally suffer from poor decision making rather than poor engineering or design. But the people making those decisions, both on our part and the clients, are smart and experienced people. We wouldn't expect them to make very many poor decisions. What project decisions on the ground generally lack is not good decision makers, but information and perspective.

Projects are done to advance business goals, not technical goals. Project decisions need to be made on the basis of sound technical thinking, but the judgement calls and strategy of project execution need to be driven by business goals. Only the client can provide the business perspective into the project execution mix. I would invite our clients to do so, with the sure expectation of better and sounder project execution to be a result.