Question

Customers often do not recognize the link between project changes and cost. They may assume that the project contract gives them unlimited rights to suggest or demand any changes after the project was developed, or that the IT solution presented to them is only a working model and subject to modifications.

How do the company’s consulting clients contribute to the problems with expanding or changing scope? If you were to hold a meeting with a potential customer, what message would you want the customer to clearly understand?

Answer 1

In order to sort of such issues right in the beginning of the project I would suggest the following to be taken care of before the actual commencement of project:

1. Work on the Business Requirement document in collaboration with client, don’t let them only to create the document and submit to you for evaluation. There are very high chances that the client will not be able to articulate the entire requirement with respect to IT or project development.
2. Project scope of work should be thoroughly discussed with all the stakeholders and ask if anyone else need to look at the documents. Always keep the member from senior management to be part of development of scope of work and while presenting the techno commercial paper and scope of work make sure those seniors are present to look at the scope of work, it will avoid the scenarios where clients organization seniors come later in to the picture and they start suggesting or asking for something which is out of scope of original contract.
3. Explain the method which you are going to develop the project e.g. are you going to adopt agile method, or you are going with waterfall and explain the scope to accommodate the changes if asked later.
4. Clearly give the estimated cost of any change request which may come in future from clients.
5. Explicitly mention the work if asked for later will be classified as change request and for those change request what would be the process to accommodate those changes.
6. Plan for a mid-development stage meeting and keep the client updated on the progress of the project.

If we take care of the above points while forming the contract in the beginning of project much of the conflict due to changes being asked from client will be avoided.