Collective Wisdom from the Experts 139
Finally, I chose to meet personally with our contractor, explained the details of
the issue, offered some possible solutions, and we were able to get our needed
equipment. In most cases, the customer is on your side and ready to support
you if you are willing to listen and help come up with a reasonable solution.
Another time, one of our clients insisted on a very short project schedule. He
wanted to shorten the production cycle of the equipment at the end of the
year, when all the factories were working at 100% capacity to close as many
purchase orders as possible. We could not accept this, because it was twice as
short as the standard project period.
Again, I organized a three-party meeting between our company, the client,
and the vendor. We freely proposed the shortest, most realistic schedule, and
explained in detail why we couldn’t shorten it more. After finishing a specially
organized inventory to discover the number of items needed for the project
we already had in stock, we took some risk and accepted the customer’s order
without even receiving the order confirmation from him.
We closed the project successfully, two days ahead of that very tight schedule.
Our client was very happy, and at the beginning of the new year offered us
another unexpected project for another $2 million. We met schedule, scope,
budget, and quality requirements, and in this case earned extra profit for the
organization as a result of the project.
Software projects rest on person-to-person communication.