7 Steps for Project Managing Difficult Clients

Sometimes as a project professional you get assigned to a project with a very difficult, demanding and high profile client. Rather than bail as many PM’s will, view this as your opportunity to stand above the rest! But how??

A PM with vision knows that the most difficult clients are the most likely to become your greatest promoters / supporters IF their needs are well managed. In fact if you inherit the client after a failure (perceived or otherwise) the expectation ‘bar’ is low and your opportunities are high!

First thing to do is to assess and understand the client and the reasons why they are difficult. It could be that the business that they are in, is also high profile and pressure on them internally is significant. It could be that they had a prior experience with your organization and it wasn’t pleasant.  There could be bad blood (politics) between your company and theirs. It may be a combination of all of these scenarios.

Regardless, the situation is that you are now in the PM seat, which in this case often times means that you are quite possibly the ‘insurance policy’, i.e., if the project goes bad, you end up being the sacrificial lamb so that both parties can start anew. This is the risk that scares most project professionals away from these opportunities.

Knowing WHY the client is unhappy and HOW to turn that around is the critical piece of your strategy. My experience with very challenging clients is that their primary concern is that they feel that they have a lack of control. They want more control than they currently have. The problem here is how do you give them more control without losing your control over the project?

Control is a matter of perception. If you can increase their perception of control by giving them increased control over certain aspects of the project (the ones that make sense) you will see a significant change in the interactive dynamic with your client.

Now how do you give them increased control?  

1.        Over Communicate – access to information increases perceived control. In this instance you may even want to build a communication plan and share it with them. Show them where they fit into the communication plan.
2.       Be as Open & Honest as you can BUT be diplomatic - Do not finger point or get drawn into the blame game. This is a slippery slope and the reality of it, is that your goal is to LEAD the team beyond that. Leaders lead.  Keep the focus on solving issues, NOT finding someone to blame, even if your execs are. They are execs but they are human first and susceptible to the same human emotions we all are.
3.       Make the client a part of your team - Involve them in the solutioning phase. The instinct to go ‘black box’ on them tends to be stronger in challenging situations. This will have the exact opposite effect as your client will immediately sense that they are being blocked out, and this will raise red flags with them.  Build a RACI matrix and share it with them and your whole team including your execs. Incorporate their feedback. You need to be an advocate for the client in your organization.
4.       Document, Document, Document – You will need to do a little more documentation than you may be accustomed to. More than is normally needed. Leaving critical items like business requirements (BRs) or functional requirements (FRs) to verbal communication only leaves room for the blame game to start again. He said / she said never works in your favor. As the potential insurance policy, you DO NOT want to leave that to chance.  Create a document with the client’s business requirements (preferably verbatim from their own documentation), align each individual business requirement with the corresponding functional requirement(s). Schedule walk-throughs, internally first, then with all parties including the client. Where possible use a screen sharing tool so that the client can SEE what changes are being made in real time and can correct you. Seek their approval / feedback throughout the session. Send a copy of the revised document to everyone immediately after the meeting. Setting the stage for the Ask and the Solution with everyone in the same room increases their sense of control, and increases accountability for those on your team who must deliver. Everyone is on the hook. You are in control.
5.       Keep all team members honest, regardless of their title – if the reputation of the client is that they are difficult, the tendency for your team members will be to minimize or avoid interaction altogether. Fear can even create a sense of paralysis within your team. As a leader your job is to alleviate this paralysis before it destroys your project. Joint walk throughs of the BRs and FRs not only allows you to hold your team accountable for their deliverables and the quality, it allows you to hold the client accountable to the quality of their BR’s. If they are vague, ask them to clarify what they want the end product to look like. You can’t deliver a specific solution to a vague BR. If needed, draw out a simple set of use cases or a logical flow on a white board. Another opportunity to demonstrate leadership. Know the land mines before holding these sessions, and decide on your game plan, with your internal team, to address them if any are stepped on in the joint sessions.
6.       Plan ahead. - Even if it is a workback schedule with key milestones. If you don’t have a clearly documented and shared plan (with the client as well) you’ll find yourself fighting a never ending uphill battle. Others will control the narrative that is your project, unless you have a plan documented and widely distributed. As the insurance policy, you MUST control the narrative in these situations. In the absence of a detailed project plan, you still need a solid general direction to move in. As the BRs and FRs become clearer, you can create a more comprehensive plan. Put the onus back on the team to provide their solutions before committing to a plan based on guesses and sheer luck. Remember a plan is not a work of art, it’s a compass. You will have to course correct throughout. If not, they wouldn't need you ;)
7.       Stress release – you will absorb a lot of negative energy. You will hear a lot of complaints and have to withstand a lot of venting. That is the role of a leader BUT you are human. Take up long walks, running, weight lifting, martial arts (this is my favorite ;) or whatever interests you and allows you to release all of the negativity you’ll be absorbing. It has to go somewhere so that you can keep your sanity, refocus the negative energy into productivity and weather the storming phase while you move your team through the norming and performing phases.

Most won’t understand what you are doing or why. But then you are leading they aren’t. This is one of those soft skills that great PMs have but most don’t realize. It’s the intangible asset.

What they will understand are the results. Stay focused and committed to your project, your client and your internal team (in that order) and your results will follow.

The most difficult clients can become your greatest promoters. By complaining, they are giving you an opportunity to win them over. They want someone who will look out for their needs. The client that has a complaint but doesn't complain to you, is your greatest risk.

Listen, learn and be flexible. Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. 

Agree? Disagree? Please send your feedback to sbest@exorion.net

For more information on tools & techniques that you can use to improve your project performance and increase the value of your brand:

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by Sean Best, PMP. Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunications and software development industries in Canada and the US. He can be reached at sbest@exorion.net

Work Back Schedules: Friend or Foe?

I've had a like / hate thing with work back schedules over the years. It’s the eternal battle between building your plan quickly or building it with precision. The answer to this battle is somewhere in between the two.

A work back schedule is a very high level timeline that you draft out on a white board starting with the last deliverable of the project, and marking down the broad stroke milestones going backwards to the beginning. Then you use your understanding of roughly how long each of those deliverables usually take and plot in the dates, starting with the go live / launch milestone, with the date that was already promised to the client and written in pencil on the back of a cocktail napkin by your sales rep!

By the time you get to the beginning of the timeline, (the last item you mark on the board) you’ll see whether you have plenty of run way, or whether you're launching B-25B Mitchell U.S. Army Air Force bombers from the deck of a U.S. Navy Aircraft carrier (See the Doolittle Raid on Japan for the reference ;)! 

What you end up with is a very basic but good educated guess on how much time you’ll need to execute your project.

The broad stroke deliverables (if you manage IT projects for example) working backwards from the go live date, could be:

·                  Deployment (Change board approval & code deployment) – 5 days

·                  User Acceptance Testing (user experience) – 4 weeks

·                  Quality Assurance Testing (testing that functionality works and doesn’t break production) – 4 weeks

·                  Development (writing code / configuration) – 4 weeks

·                  Functional Requirements Documentation (documenting HOW the code needs to work / functions that it will need to perform) – 4 weeks

·                  Business Requirements Documentation (documenting WHAT the functionality needs to do) – 4 weeks

·                  Use Cases (documenting process flows of what the functionality needs to do to satisfy the business goals.) – 2 weeks

·                  Submit business case to the project review & prioritization committee – 1 week.

This means that your guesstimate total duration for this project is about 6 months from start to finish.

If the napkin said that the target go live date was January 1st 2014, you would have needed to start your project July 1st 2013. If today is Oct 13th 2013, your gap (the difference between your preferred or target go live date, and what it would actually be if you started today) is about 3 ½ months. Your go live date is likely closer to April 15th 2014.

Now this is NOT an exact science, BUT it does give you a good idea on the do-ability of this project in the time you've got to work with.

Now you can make choices about how to satisfy this business need. Do you scale back the scope of the project to recover 3 ½ months? Do you break the project into smaller phases so that you can deliver SOMETHING by Jan 1st?  Do you add more resources to speed up delivery? Do you negotiate moving the target date out? You have options, which at this early stage of the project are much easier to discuss and gain support for than you would if you waited until you developed the detailed project plan and are well into the project. 

If you wait, it will be too late to have these conversations without a lot of push back. This is where you build your brand and add value as a project manager.

The risks of using this approach incorrectly include making the mistake of using this work back schedule as your execution plan. You will need to re-assess your plan based on information that you find out once the functional requirements are done and your developers have had a chance to provide their Level of Effort (LOE). You will need to build out the details of your plan with more precise information and re-calibrate it once you have this LOE.

As a result you should not commit to a delivery based on the work back schedule. It is a thumb-in-the-air guesstimate, not a precise forecast. It gives the key parties a good idea of the general scope of the project, not an exact prediction.

The value add you bring to the table includes the ability to gauge the scope and duration of a project quickly and early on, so that your business leads and sales team can manage the message as early on as possible. 

You can use your work back plan as your barometer to determine how realistic the target date is (or not). And most importantly, you have milestones to drive your team towards for the first few deliverables - project committee approval of scope, development of use cases, business requirements and functional requirements. Because these deliverables can be subjective and involve departments that do not normally work within the confines of a timeline, they need to have target dates to have their work complete IF the target date is going to be a realistic date for your ‘go live’.  

It also allows them to prioritize their work. No target dates for these early deliverables equates to an absence of urgency for your team (i.e., low priority). Your project sits in limbo while you WAIT for direction. Even without all of the details you can still drive your project forward. DO NOT WAIT!

The benefit to you as the project manager is that it gets your team working NOW, while it buys you time to build out your more detailed project plan. No one is waiting on you (and pressuring you) to get a plan put out there yet. 

Take advantage of this time to press your team forward while you build more precision into your plan. The analogy that I use is that you know that you need to go west from the start. You may not know if your final destination is Los Angeles, San Francisco or Las Vegas. Your work back schedule is like a compass. Your detailed project plan is more like a GPS. In both cases you are marching west. The detailed plan will give you specific routes but you still have to go west. You may need to alter your course a bit but you have already started marching. 

The alternative is to wait until you have every route, detour, alternate route, gas stop, hotel, restaurant, Wal-Mart, Pep Boys, etc. mapped and planned out before you leave your house. Time wasted that you cannot recover. Your 6 months extends to 10 months or more while you put everyone on hold until you’ve got your masterpiece plan. However your business will have lost ground and position in the market place. You are either driving the bus or trying to catch it. 

You can’t lead from behind. Get in front of it early and provide your team direction while you figure out the details to build your ‘Mona Lisa’.

This process is a powerful tool to add to your PM tool kit for improving your brand and your reputation for execution excellence in project management. For more information on tools & techniques that you can use to improve your project performance in increase the value of your brand join us on Twitter @exOrionLLC.

by Sean Best, PMP. Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunication and software development industries. He can be reached at sbest@exorion.net