F2CONSULTING®

1) A client wants a job done by tomorrow and we have no one free to do it: what can we do?

2) We have to organise a meeting in two weeks’ time and we neither have contents to propose nor the time or personnel to prepare them… but the decision has been made that we must attend the meeting anyway: what can we do?

3) A client has requested the creation of a programme with an extremely tight consignment schedule and a significant lack of specific information: what can we do?

How many times have we found ourselves in this situation?

The best thing to do here is to take a deep breath, empty the mind and try calmly to see what can concretely be done with the personnel, the specifications and the time available.
The most important first step is undoubtedly to check with the subject commissioning such projects whether the information we have is complete, and try to clear up with them any doubts we may have.

Some people fear that doing this “will cause the client to wonder about our professionalism”, but in reality the opposite is the case.

Asking questions and raising doubts in view of technical problems is a clear indication of experience and professionalism.

If problems emerge once a job has been carried out, the consequences can be complex and damaging: emergency solutions have to be found to patch up the errors, a process originally planned in a different way has to be modified and reassembled awkwardly, involving time loss and compromise, poorer results than initially planned and an extremely shoddy impression being transmitted to the client.

If – once all aspects of the commission have been analysed and the necessary information gathered – we conclude that it is not possible to carry out the job in the time and under the circumstances, we must inform the client… at which point we can propose a series of partial consignments for this project or discuss the possibility of shifting the consignment deadline.

We should never undertake to perform an impossible task for fear of damaging our reputation: quality, reliability and professionalism are invaluable assets in the tough world of business, and failure to respect even one delivery schedule can have a deadly effect on our reputation for quality, reliability and professionalism.

My grandmother used to say “remember that a live donkey is more intelligent than a dead professor”… which in our case means, it’s much better to turn down a job explaining why it is impossible to carry it out satisfactorily than to make promises which you can’t fulfil.

Customers can respect this attitude, and very often they’ll come back to you later, having tried someone else’s unfulfilled promises!