It should be simple to manage clients as a consultant. See, when you land the consulting contract, you’ll be assigned a project authority. That is the person in your client organization that you’ll be dealing with. They’re called project authority because the organization has theoretically delegated them decision making power over your contract.
Theoretically.
Generally, they don’t have as much authority as we want them to, and the inexperienced ones don’t have nearly as much authority as they think they do. This can lead to issues down the line.
In addition to the project authority, you may meet the project sponsor. This is the person who actually has authority, who commissioned the contract in the first place, and who signs all the cheques. This person is generally too busy to deal with you on a regular basis, sadly.
And here’s the great risk: over the course of your contract, as you meet your milestones and hand in your reports, the project authority’s job is to gather and collate feedback and send it to you. Their job is to sign off on your submissions so the project can move forward. Which all sounds great until…
The Swoop and Poop
Often, the project authority signs off on things because they naively believe they are an have the authority to do so. Why wouldn’t they believe it? It’s what their superiors have been telling them.
But sometimes, the people with real authority—and a real vested interest in your project—are Far Too Busy to deal with all of these phased submissions. They will lurk in the wings until virtually all the milestones have been met, all the submissions signed off on, and you’re just on the homestretch, getting ready to tie a beautiful bow on the whole project. That’s the point when they will suddenly wake up, realize that shit is getting real, and start to go back and read all your interim reports. And sometimes they swoop in and want to change everything, including decisions that were signed off on weeks or months earlier. We call that the 11th Hour Swoop and Poop. It happens. Like a lot. This is what makes it tough to manage clients and their expectations.
So everything you do during the contract should be engineered to avoid the swoop and poop.
Meet with your project authority regularly. It doesn’t have to be every week; it just has to be often enough that you can talk to them about how the project is going and what they’re hearing from their colleagues.
With every submission, get sign-off in writing from the project authority. Every single submission. It doesn’t have to be formal. Sometimes it’s as simple as an email saying, “Can you please confirm that this submission is accepted and you’re signing off? I’m excited about starting the next phase.” But get something in writing, so you can push back when suddenly the client wants to revisit decisions made long before.
More on how to manage clients
Consider a regular Friday summary email saying, “Here’s what I worked on this week; here’s what I learned; here’s what I’ll follow up next week; here’s how everything is going.” Clients love these emails; it lets them know things are going well. It’s good client relations.
When Clients Disappear
Sometimes it’s your client who will fall off the map. Sometimes you don’t hear from them for days or weeks.
When that happens, you’ve got a couple of choices. You can try hailing them on all frequencies (phone calls, emails, whatever you’ve got) until you get the information you need.
Alternately, you can put your head down and make some progress on your other projects. I do this a lot: if the client has gone dormant, I shift my focus to something else until a) they wake up or b) I have a milestone that really needs some input from them.
Sometime a dormant client is a little gift from the work planning gods. Use it as such.