| Topic Name: |
Dealing with difficult business end-user |
| Message Name: |
Reach an agreement.. |
| Date Posted: |
11/16/2002 |
| In Reply To: |
Dear friend,
Depending on whether this business-user you are interacting with has more offers for you in the pipeline and also depending on how influential this person is, I would say that this is a great challenge to accept.
As the first level of assessment, it will be a good idea to do a relationship-analysis with this person to determine how critical this contract really is.
If it is beneficial to you (and your team) to go ahead with this engagement, then you should perform the next level of analysis - technical-analysis.
The fact that a 3rd party consulting company could not deliver doesn't mean that your team will not be able to. From what I understand, many manuals and a lot of code from the 1 year effort will be at your disposal. You can re-mediate this material to help build the solution much faster. At this level, you will need to assess how much time and resources this would require. Once you have a model solution to the problem - it will be much easier to get this person off your back or make him extend the deadline without hassles! He will in turn be able to use this model solution to convince his superiors!
P.S. : Be sure to factor the risks in your project time-line! This way your gestimate will not be highly questionable (because risks are after all non-quantifiable!).
Hope this helps!
Thanks.
DC-US! |
| Message: |
A little relationship building can help "the tech guys" survive "the business guys". A detailed SCOPE for the project, including deadlines and work agreed upon, takes the the emotional hammer out of the "going to the boss" gambit.
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