Come on…we manage these projects day in and day out. Most are normal project requests with normal clients. You create your schedule, you kick the project off, you create a solution or a campaign or a design, or a website, or whatever. You test it, your client tests it, you roll it out to them, then you wave goodbye. Done. Pretty straightforward. I realize I’m way oversimplifying it for the masses…a whole lot goes into delivering that project. A lot of headaches, a lot of design work, at lot of marketing strategy, a lot of creative thinking and re-thinking and re-work. But many projects are – for the most part – overall about the same from a process standpoint.
But some clients are different. I want you to think real hard – go back as far as you can. Tell us…what is the strangest request that a client has ever made of you on a project. Keep it ‘G-rated’ please. I’m in Las Vegas and I can say that as a consultant working with various organizations in project management roles for one-off projects, I’ve witnessed some strange requests (a couple were illegal, I think) made of the organizations I was consulting for but thankfully not of me. But I have had strange requests made of me. I’m a project manager and I was asked to basically not manage the project on one engagement. The budget was limited and they thought project managers were useless overhead…so I complied and stayed in the shadows charging little to no time to the project while still overseeing my lead developers work on the effort (believe me…he needed the oversight). By doing that I won the client over.
But some clients are different. I want you to think real hard – go back as far as you can. Tell us…what is the strangest request that a client has ever made of you on a project. Keep it ‘G-rated’ please. I’m in Las Vegas and I can say that as a consultant working with various organizations in project management roles for one-off projects, I’ve witnessed some strange requests (a couple were illegal, I think) made of the organizations I was consulting for but thankfully not of me. But I have had strange requests made of me. I’m a project manager and I was asked to basically not manage the project on one engagement. The budget was limited and they thought project managers were useless overhead…so I complied and stayed in the shadows charging little to no time to the project while still overseeing my lead developers work on the effort (believe me…he needed the oversight). By doing that I won the client over.
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