Bad Clients

Not all clients are created equal. Sadly some clients are not committed to the project – they may have other priorities, or even see the failure of the project as desirable. They may vacillate between commitment and complete ignore. If you have a bad client you should make a choice – to stay and make the best of the situation, or to go. If you choose to stay, you may be able to promote the project to the extent that it becomes a priority again; but if you do, you should not assume this will stay a priority without constant attention from you. You may be able to promote the project to someone else, perhaps securing their commitment and supplanting the bad client with a good one. You may just find that you are hung out to dry.

Sign-off seems pretty easy, but gaining sign-off often involves buy-in. Certainly the accomplishment of the Ultimate Objective involves buy-in.

We generally achieve buy-in by either directly involving people in the project (if not all people affected, certainly a significant number of ‘thought leaders’), or by ensuring that people cannot live without the results of our project. The latter is far less common than you would think, so as project managers we generally rely on people’s involvement to secure their ‘buy-in’.