Seven Lessons Learned From A Project We Lost
How we won (and lost) a really exciting project.
Names have been intentionally changed to protect the innocent”
It was close to the end of 2006. Google had acquired YouTube. Vice President Dick Cheney had shot his friend in the face. The Knife released Silent Shout. Twitter was new. Business was booming. Our name and work was spreading around town.
One crisp autumn afternoon, when the trees were giving back the sun’s radiance, Vince came over for a meeting. He had recently started working for a local, well-known company, whom we’ll refer to as ACME Media. In the days leading up to the meeting, I muttered more than once “how fucking awesome would it be to add this in our portfolio.”
Vince explained that he had pitched an ambitious project to ACME’s CEO and had essentially been hired to execute it. He had a timeline, a starting budget, and the authority to make it happen.
We Only Invested Into One Relationship
Over a few weeks, we collaborated with Vince to pull together a proposal and a project plan, which included a timeline, project scope, and an estimated cost range. Then, we met with ACME’s CEO to pitch the project plan.
At the time, this was one of the most intimidating meetings that I had ever prepared for. The CEO laid out ACME’s vision and expectations: expanding their target market, revenue streams, and getting ahead of their national competitors. We talked shop and shared some of our ideas for the project. It felt like a really productive and engaging discussion.
It was also the only time that I ever spoke to the CEO.
We Won The Project!
Vince was keen to get those ideas out of his head and into reality. Because we were working in an agile approach (short iterations), it made sense to focusing on some of the more ambitious areas of the project first.
We scheduled our resources and began working on the initial iterations. We’d get approval on wireframes, then begin implementation. We develop the project in chunks, testing as we go, rather than waiting until we have a complete first draft to share for feedback. It felt like we were building one of our most polished pieces of work.
We spent a lot of time meeting with Vince. He’d come over to our studio and talk through requirements, review wireframes, assist us with quality assurance, and shoot the shit.
Excitement Overrode Early Red Flags
After one visit, I distinctly remember one of my partners saying, “Wow, I feel like I’m a counselor for Vince sometimes. There seems to be a lot of politics over at their organization.” My carefree reply was something along the lines of, “politics related to this project?”
We learned that some of ACME’s more senior folks weren’t really “getting” what Vince was trying to do. He was the new guy who got himself hired and began engaging with an external agency. From my perspective, this seemed like a sensible thing to do. The CEO wanted to take a really huge leap forward, and it didn’t sound like they had the internal resources to execute that vision in the timeline that they had hoped for.
We dismissed it as their problem and continued pressing ahead.
By our sixth iteration, we began to hit problems with one of those exciting, innovative components. The wireframes –vetted by our technical lead and approved by Vince in a previous iteration- were turning out to be really complicated. The iteration hit the budget and timeline hard. We missed the due date. The developers struggled to get some vital pieces fixed. Bugs kept popping up. The project’s velocity slowed.
Our iterations had an attached price range and scope. We tried to keep these to two-week chunks of work, but this one was just not getting to a point where we could get sign off. We negotiated an increased budget for the iteration which helped offset some of the losses we were beginning to absorb.
It was easy to rationalize the losses. This project was going to be the crown jewel in our portfolio. This was going to be huge for us!
STOP: The Biggest Red Flag Of Them All
Throughout this, Vince echoed frustrations from ACME. The original schedule had fallen away like so many autumn leaves. Because our new iteration contracts had due dates past the original, we weren’t too concerned. Sometimes, a project’s true size reveals itself only after you get deep into it. We assumed that the CEO’s expectations were also being met — so pressed ahead on our end and started tackling the next iteration.
About seven months into the project, Vince asked to meet.
He had given his two weeks notice.
(You can probably imagine the frigid jolt that ran down my spine. I wasn’t surprised entirely, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at this point in the project.)
Vince explained that he just couldn’t continue working in that environment. The internal debates and politics had drained his energy. ACME was going to find someone else to work with us. We were advised to continue pressing ahead on the upcoming iterations of work. He approved some wireframes, iteration plans, and said he’d try to get one of our outstanding invoices paid before leaving.
Vince finished his two weeks. We continued pressing ahead.
Six weeks passed before we met Vince’s replacement, Cheryl. She was new to this project and to ACME. While we waited through Cheryl’s on-boarding to discuss future iterations, we continued chipping away at what we’d already agreed to work on with Vince.
We felt confident that we were working toward the vision that Vince and the CEO had outlined.
The Replacement
I first met Cheryl in the hallway of our office building as I was walking to the bathroom. I distinctly remember saying, “Hi, I’m Robby. I’m looking forward to working with you” and offered to shake her hand. Cheryl responded coolly; “We’ll see. I have to figure out where this project is and what we’ll do next.” She walked past me into our studio. Slightly confused, I continued on to the restroom, wondering “what the hell did that mean?”
Back in our conference room, Cheryl outlined that she was trying to figure out what the hell Vince had been doing. She had printed copies of every iteration contract and then pulled out the original proposal that had been presented to the CEO. Red ink circles and notes covered the pages.
Cheryl had spent some time reviewing the project, and determined that we had failed to deliver on our original proposal.
Cheryl hadn’t heard about our iterative approach, so I began to explain that we use a project proposal to ensure that all the stakeholders understand the vision of the project and how we’d begin working. Our statement of work divided into small iterations that ACME had approved and paid for. They get to work with us on deciding how much of their budget they’d use, iteration by iteration.
Cheryl didn’t seem to get it (or was intentionally not getting it). ACME would not approve a new iteration until we had fixed all remaining bugs in the previous iterations. Their outstanding invoices were over $30k.
We still felt confident that we’d sort through everything. We just needed to spend some time to help Cheryl understand our approach. Vince got it. All of our other clients got it. We assumed that the CEO understood how this all worked; we had explained our process when we met eight months before.
Cheryl said they’d approve the outstanding invoices once we fixed the remaining bugs, bugs that were related to a different iteration and budget. As an act of good will, we agreed, thinking that we’d build some trust with her.
Then Things Got Weird
ACME asked for access to the source code, backups of staging database, etc. Nothing that we weren’t willing to do, but what were they going to do with this?
We cooperated and I asked about our outstanding invoices. ‘The decision is sitting with the CEO,’ Cheryl said. We had to wait on that.
A few weeks later, we got an email severing our engagement. Cheryl had hired a new local agency to take over the project.
We were fired.
They were not going to pay their final invoices. Their lawyer countered our request, saying that we owed ACME money for failing to deliver the original project scope.
We took on new projects to make up for our losses. We didn’t think we had the money or mental energy for a legal battle, so we just kept kicking the “we’ll hire a lawyer next month” conversation down the road.
We felt like we got the wrong end of the stick and just wanted to stop talking about the damn project. It became taboo.
The next year, ACME launched a new web project. It didn’t include the innovative features Vince and we had been working on. It was on par with what you’d expect at that time. Through the grapevine, we learned that ACME had scrapped our work and started from scratch.
Not only did we not get paid for our effort, the fruits of our labor never saw the light of day.
If you believe this story would be valuable for others to read, please consider recommending it!
Lessons Learned
1. Build Deeper Relationships With Your Clients
Vince was our only connection with ACME. Aside from pitching the CEO, we hadn’t really invested energy into any other relationship.
Epic mistake.
Now, when we work with larger organizations we make time to meet our primary contact’s managers and their coworkers. We try to get over to their physical location more often (whereas, Vince would always come visit us for a few hours’ escape). We ask our clients to keep us updated on any restructuring in their organization and to introduce us to new managers when they are brought in.
You might believe you’ll be working with your client in six months, but you never know if it might be a completely different set of people.
This might sound like a lot of work, so share it among your team. Ask them to feed you names that come up in conversation. And to solicit feedback on the project from other people within the organization.
This Helped Us Win $2M in Work
Two years after ACME, this lesson came in handy. Within six months of a new engagement, we had established strong relationships with about six of the client’s employees. When we found out that the director of the department had taken another job, we thought ‘Here we go again.’
Fortunately, when the replacement arrived, our six contacts backed us up — explaining that we were extremely valuable and a committed partner. This simplified the transition substantially.
Director #2 took another job within the organization. Good grief. Here we go again! (This is starting to sound like a broken record)
The organization decided to relocate Director #3 to London temporarily. The move across eight time zones was a real concern for us.
Two of us flew to London to meet with the new director face-to-face. This wasn’t about future work, this was a sales trip. We had to go in there, explain our process, highlight the value we’d brought over the past three years and earn the new director’s trust. Those existing two employees within the organization raved about all that we had done for them.
We must have impressed the new director as we were able to extend this relationship for three more years[1].
Deeper relationships helped us to retain that project for five and a half years. We designed and developed some amazing projects in that time, which brought in about $2 million in revenue.
It’s far easier to sell to your existing clients than to find new ones.
Invest wisely.
2. Sometimes, Shit (Just) Happens
Whenever we look back on it, we continue to beat ourselves up over how our project with Vince/ACME panned out.
- How did we not see this coming?
- Why didn’t we insist on a chance to speak with the CEO before we were fired?
- Why didn’t we hire a lawyer to help us get paid?
- How could we have better explained our process to Cheryl?
- Why didn’t we have any other allies within their company?
- Did we actually screw this project up so badly?
It took several years for us to really come to terms with what had happened. You can spend an unhealthy amount of time going through all the, “why didn’t we?” type questions. Some projects, as we have learned over the years, just don’t work out.
You learn from them. You move on.
3. Maintain A Project Narrative
If there were one thing that I wish we had done differently on Vince’s project, it would be keeping a project narrative.
This living document would capture the project’s highlights over its lifespan. It would have been something that Vince and our team would have collaborated on and shared regularly with the other stakeholders. It would have kept readers up to date without requiring too much effort on their part. When a stakeholder wants more clarification, only then would we point towards individual Statements of Works, contracts, Basecamp and email threads, invoices, wireframes, etc.
If we’d had an up-to-date project narrative to present to Cheryl when she started, we would have had a much better chance with ACME and the project. As it happened, we’ll never know what story Cheryl presented to the CEO.
More importantly, let’s be empathetic to anyone who inherits a long-term project. Nobody wants to spend that much time getting up to speed on things. A project narrative document[2] would have been a big help.
4. Share Your Story
The ‘ACME fiasco’ has become part of Planet Argon lore.
When folks on our team ask for help navigating changes surrounding a project, the elders (Gary Blessington and I) reference this project a few times each year.
Confession: one of the reasons that I wrote this post was so that I could share it with newer additions to our team. Two birds. *drop mic* ;-)
For example, one of our Project Managers recently sent out a status update for one of our larger accounts. On this occasion, a single sentence caught my eye. Our primary contact’s manager had switched departments. Our primary contact would be reporting to someone new.
Nobody on our team knew this new manager. So, I immediately reached out to our primary contact for an introduction. I congratulated the previous manager on his new role, which brought back a glowing, unsolicited testimonial. To cover our bases, I also asked him for an introduction to the new manager.
Again, we don’t know who we might be working with six months from now, so we nurture each and every client relationship.
5. Update Your Contracts
When we had conversations about entering a legal dispute with ACME, we realized that our original proposal didn’t stipulate that the contracts for individual iterations’ Statements of Work would supersede the original contract.
When we were debating with Cheryl, she kept pulling out the original proposal saying, “the CEO signed off on all of these items, but you’ve only delivered a portion of them.” This opened up a murky gray area. We’d done exactly what we said we’d do. Those other items were just on the roadmap for future iterations.
Looking back, we probably should have had the CEO sign some proposal amendments ensuring everyone was on the same page (legally speaking).
6. Don’t Assume Everyone Is On The Same Page
Based on our discussions with Vince over the project’s lifespan, we had been blissfully ignorant of what other stakeholders knew about the project’s scope prioritization, schedule, and budget.
We had used up most of the original budget to work on some of those innovative features that I mentioned earlier. We thought that Vince was going to bring in extra budget. Until, of course, he quit.
7. Don’t Throw Anyone Under the Bus
When we figured out that other individuals at ACME weren’t on the same page, we quickly realized that the situation might be irreparable. It would have been easy for us to direct our frustration at Vince for “abandoning” his project.
But that’s not what happened. He didn’t have many options at the time. He did what was best for him. (Makes me think of the safety instructions you hear on airplanes: put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.)
Sure, we had our own emotional (and financial) anxieties, but I can’t imagine what was going through Vince’s head during that time. Vince walked away from his baby.
Vince went on to work on some other rather interesting and successful projects. He’s always been pushing the envelope. We hold him in high esteem to this day.
People come and go from organizations. We need to be supportive when they go off and pursue new paths. It’s our responsibility to keep the long-term relationship with the organization healthy.
Closing Thoughts
I am skeptical that any alternative approach would have changed the outcome with ACME. The fact is, we didn’t build deeper relationships in their organization.
These days, we try to minimize risk across our projects by asking ourselves these questions:
- Has our direct client contact demonstrated that they understand the value that our team brings to their organization? (If not, the other questions don’t really matter.)
- Are all invested stakeholders aware of the project’s status right now?
- Outside of our direct client contacts, is there anyone else that can pull the plug on this project? If so, how long has it been since we talked with them?
- Has our direct client contact indicated that they might not be happy in their position?
- What are our direct client contact’s long-term career goals?
- If our direct contact(s) were to leave the company today, how quickly could we help their replacement get up to speed? What lingering open issues would be really complicated to explain to someone new?
- Are all of our agreements signed and organized?
- Has there been any structural reorganization in our client’s organization?
While we can’t always save a project during client transitions, applying these lessons gives us a fighting chance. When we do, more often than not, it has been extremely lucrative.
When you win a project with a new client, remember that it is not the last time you will need to sell to them.
Make it Happen.
P.S. While drafting this post over the last week, I found out that one of our primary contacts for an existing client had quit. Here we go again!
[1] Eventually, the eight-hour time difference became a toll on the relationship as their internal team grew from four to twelve people. They also wanted to renegotiate our billing rates as they were finding it hard to turn down competitive bids from a regionally closer agency that had pitched lower rates. We parted ways and still keep in touch. A story for another day.
[2] Do you use other tools to ramp up new clients (or internal staff) on an existing project?
