Since past few months, we have been working with one of the top 5 organizations in the world to deliver couple of projects. It has been a different experience since we are heavily relying on their internal coordination which has been impacting delivery. Obviously, as is the usual thinking process that when you outsource the project, you expect the vendor to deliver it completely.
We have been in such scenarios earlier; however, the scope has had been defined towards consulting and implementation very clearly and our role started only post defining. In this case, our customer has had bagged larger orders from their end customers promising to deliver items without clearly defining the scope. Net result? We are ending up getting scope creeps whenever demos are being done!
We have been repeatedly requesting our customer to sync up with end customer to get the scope clarified so that the solution can be designed and the development can get started. Their end customer is also obviously expecting our customer to deliver it by taking ownership as the project has been outsourced. Since our customer has several teams to complete different activities, they end up wasting time in either follow-ups, pointing fingers to each other, taking own sweet time to complete activities and expect us to complete the job in less time.
We have figured out an approach to keep tracker and maintain effective communication to avoid delays, heartburns, ego issues etc. We have started to maintain a tracker of issues raised, resolved and closed apart from ensuring to accommodating changes and locking on the scope. However, this is clearly not a movie scene where the hero is trying to woo or impress his heroine and she can comment that she is not afraid to get slapped but of falling in love. This is a critical situation where, forget even about the idea of falling in love, we are hoping not to get slapped in the face due to issues created that are beyond our control! We have been able to win the confidence of end customer by demonstrating our capabilities. Since we have taken up this project, there is no going back. We need to certainly deliver it without compromising on quality and yet meeting customer expectations knowing that it is a difficult task to do.
We have certainly worked hard to safeguard our reputation of being the best. We would prefer to deliver the project and possibly exceeding the customer (and their end customer’s) expectations. Thappad se definitely dar lagta hai sahab 🙂
