Pointing the finger – blame and risks in digital project management

There are many aspects during a digital project that do not go according to plan; even if you had one. Project Management is about control but, particularly in digital projects, your clients and your team can often seem to conspire against the progress of the project. Your management, on the other hand, are meant to be there supporting you. If this isn’t the case, you’re in trouble. Are you in a company that has an attitude of ‘sacrificial accountability’?

It is common that if and when things go wrong, someone takes the blame and resigns from his/her post. I think that most people view this as acceptable when it is clear who has had the overall accountability during the time that the problems brewed and blew up. But looking for the sacrificial lamb is another thing entirely as John Linwood, ex BBC, found out. He was Chief Technology Officer for the BBC when the plug was pulled on a £100m Digital Media Initiative project. He took the BBC to a tribunal for firing him and won because they believed that the Senior Management were dodging the blame and placing it on Linwood.

John Gough in Avoiding Blame for Botched Projects, (undated 2014), summarises the Linwood story and points to internal company politics as a driver. We all know company politics and how it can invidiously dominate decision-making. How’s your company for this?

The risk of being sacked as the accountable one is real but companies are beginning to understand that they need to get on top of risks before they cause trouble. Enter the Digital Risk Officer. Have you heard of them or seen a job advert for one? You may well find you have to relate to them in your client companies. Apparently, these people will be hot news in 2015 according to Gartner research 2014 . Now this is in response to security issues and technology as companies realise that with the plethora of technology-driven channels of communication and the increasing use of them by the public at large, that the risks of service failures increase. It will be interesting to see if these officers are increasingly used as easy target sacrificial lambs by their companies when things go wrong! But if you meet them as part of the client-mix, you can be sure that they’ll make strong demands of you making your job more accountable too.

Now you’re in the mindset of blame, perhaps you need to become aware of a nasty blow coming from an unseen upper-cut! This has crept in from the side of a legal ruling about blame in a service contract. The original case was about pipes and little to do with digital project management. (See, The Best Practice Group, Your Service Provider’s Duty to Warn, by Alan Watton (23 January 2012) But as the ruling can be generalised to all service contracts, we need to take note. The judgement found that the contractor (expert) should have warned the client about the possible risks in the project because they as the experts were in the position to know the possible impact on the clients while the clients as non-experts – and the very reason for using the contractors – were not in the position to understand the impact.

The key concept is ‘a duty to warn’ about the risks pre-contract and during the life of the project and exists independently of written clauses. You have to account for what your advice does and does not cover. You have to be clear in writing about what your advice does not cover and what your proposed solution does not cover including any possible consequential impacts. Well, that’s a tall order in our uncertain digital world. You need to throw this concept to the legal bods who draw up your contracts as service providers. Now if you are too small to have a legal section, check if the templates you use for contracts cover this angle and raise any queries with your management.

You’ll probably do a lot of ‘warning’ without realising it. So, for example, if you recommend that your client should do some pilot testing with users to check the system out and assess its impact on the project objectives pointing out to them the pros and cons of this, then you are warning them of the possible negative effects/risks. If they take the decision not to do this, they accept responsibility and accountability. Likewise, you’ll probably be recommending various types of testing from stability to security, for example. You can indicate the pros and cons of all of them, so if the client chooses to ignore your advice - because of lack of budget maybe - then you have fulfilled the ‘duty of warning’ principle.
Blame is not a nice topic in any field. Better to be prepared though.

Educating clients – worth every effort

Often your client's way of thinking is a world away from your development perspective on what is right for them under the circumstances.

Does this statement ring true for you? Winning projects and keeping clients happy are not easy. You are often pulling in different directions, either because you know the technology and what it is capable of, you know they can't afford what you could really give them, or you know how their customers relate to technology and the client isn't the listening type.

Maybe you should consider educating your clients regularly by a drip feed of soft training advice. This is best offered when you're actually not in the throws of a project as they can react badly to such advice then. They are, after all, the clients and paying you to produce what they want.

We came across a few bits of advice that are really worth passing on. Avara - internet marketing consultants - list their five top tips as:

1. Be careful what you wish for, (really telling the client to think carefully before directing you, the developer, to do something.)
2. You are not your customer, (sound advice to get the client focused).
3. Never use the words like/dislike with feedback, (difficult to grasp without the explanation but very compelling so take a look. They suggest substituting, 'that doesn’t work because...').
4. There's usually a good reason, (this encourages clients to trust your experience before they comment).
5. What do you want your website to do? (tips on how to get clients to give you clear statements of what they want by agreeing what they wouldn’t want).

How and when to get your soft training messages across might be the subject of some debate. Avara does it on their website. But perhaps you could offer to send through a bi-monthly short article link for your clients, written by you and of interest to you both. This might be a solution. (Or you could direct them to suitable posts in this blog perhaps.) You know your clients and you'll know what is right. The strategy might vary for different clients, but it will be worth it to save some of the differences of perspective that always lead to debate/hassle in projects.

Top marks to Avara for analysing the prime issues they have found problematic with clients and for translating these into a credible, non-threatening set of tips. Their 'related news, views and advice' are worth noting too.

How do you educate your clients?

Client Relationship Management and iMedia in 2013

It was problematic to research this topic for today's blog. There seems to be a lot of confusion about customer relationship management (CRM) and client relationship management – that's without adding in interactive media.

So, to make sure we're starting from common ground, we're defining the client as the people who are paying you and the customer as the people who will be using your application. It seems that this differentiation is fundamental for our working environment when it might not be for others. Traditionally the Account Manager (in an agency environment) and the project manager (in the software development environment) have been the key people to interact with the clients and they have had to develop strategies to balance the needs of the clients against the development company's needs. This job has often been split in interactive companies between the initial contact with the client – often managers/directors – and then the nominal head of the development team as the project moves to definition and production. These roles can have many titles, of course.

But, what is clear is that clients need handling and that the people relating to them need the skills to do this. And it isn't easy! Any hints and tips should be gratefully received because this is a hard job and most needed once problems arise. Handling client expectations appears very often in job descriptions. What this means in practice is that clients' expectations are managed from the beginning whilst trust in your company is being developed. Then, as the project develops, continued relationship management practices are employed. We've found three different perspective on managing clients for you covering a variety of sector development in small businesses, agencies, and for freelance developers.

Small Business Canada has a refreshingly no-nonsense approach to this in its article, Your client is livid! 5 lessons for Client Relationship Management. They realise that communication is the key. They recommend:

• talking to the client because non-verbal communication like email/texts does not allow the full gamut of interpretation
• keeping the client informed of all progress – good and bad
• offering solutions – if things are wrong how will they be put right, how long will it take and the cost implications if any.
• don't over-promise. When your company falls short of its promises, the trust disappears and so will the client.
• add value. Suggest ways that may help the client achieve extra from their applications.

Joseph Liu, in Rethinking the client-agency relationship (17th July 2013), is also candid about his experience with the creative agency approach to development.

I've found that you can be clear about what you want without mandating how it has to be done. That you can disagree without being disagreeable. That you can be clear about your expectations while also being collaborative so that when things do get bumpy, the relationship is strong enough to handle 100 per cent candour in both directions.

For freelancers handling clients, you might prefer to look at How to manage difficult clients, at freelance.uk

They cover the thorny issue of firing clients as well as six tips on more positive ways of managing the relationship.
Well, it's a large topic that should stand alone without being confused constantly with CRM. Its importance for your business speaks for itself!

Unhappy client syndrome - have you eliminated it?

Clients are your customers and they do pay (don't they?) to keep you in work and the company going. They can be demanding, ignorant of your business nuances, and fail to recognise that a project is a partnership so they have to participate to make it happen.

On the other hand, clients often still have gripes about their developers that sound believable: fail to meet deadlines, don't perform as expected, produce work that doesn't meet the business needs, don't listen, and so on. Why haven't we managed to sort out these mainly communication-based problems?

Well, communication takes time and effort. It isn't good enough to have your company processes outlined on your website and in a company brochure. Many clients don't read these or only glance at them at the beginning of the relationship. It may well be that your description is still pretty technical as far as they're concerned and they don't understand it. You and your people need to reinforce the principles as well as draw your client's attention to them when needed in plain English.

There is a gap between the specialisms of business and technological development. It has been closing and some people have managed to straddle them. (These are the people most in demand at the moment. See our earlier blog, The Thorny iMedia Salary Debate, 12th April 2013.) Misunderstanding is generally at the bottom of most dissension. A Project Manager will know full well that this is the case as most of their time is spent on exercising control to avoid this and mitigation to appease the situation, so that the team can get on with their work. A Project Manager/Account Manager is there to take the strain between client and developers.

Now if you feel that none of this applies to you, well done indeed. Perhaps your company receives glowing reviews from your clients. Do you know? Are you checking what people say about you? You may not be able to employ people full time to check out and report back on tweets, postings and electronic reviews like large businesses do, but you can schedule time to check the social temperature on your company from time to time. You might be pleasantly surprised and be able to incorporate praise on your own media platforms. If there are criticisms you need to look into their validity and decide how to avoid such negativity again.

There are companies that specialise in reviews, (just think of Tripadvisor), and this fashion is spreading into all areas. Just take a moment to think about the implications especially if you're an agency by looking at 5 places to look for client reviews and recommendations for a Website Design Agency, from WWDC (which web design company), 27th March 2013. They list themselves at the top.

Happy browsing!