Don’t Let Clients Rule Over You
One of the things I would like to rant about today is, companies that let themselves be ruled by ‘powerful’ clients. And I don’t mean the Hollywood mafia style of powerful clients. I mean clients that are bigger than the organization they buy products from. Big powerful corporations with multi-billion dollar capital and resources spread out throughout the entire world.
Some of these kinds of clients like to bully smaller businesses in getting what they want. On occasion they tend to threaten smaller companies with canceling deals, contracts or, whatever relationship the smaller business have painstakingly build with the client in years. When they do this, all projects except for one, gets all the attention allocated to it. That one project that deals with the needs of that one bullying client.
Understandably, companies sometimes want to gain access to new markets, launch products in a new country or simply grow through the business through clients or other business acquaintances. Therefore companies go a bit further in leveraging assistance from clients by providing their products at a discount in exchange for some new business channels. That’s when things get tricky. The clients feel like they can bully their way through this new relationship in order to get much features for a much lower price or even free sometimes. That’s where I feel like project managers need to step in.
I feel like it is especially at that moment, a company should consider a BRM framework to introduce more structure in the corporate management of projects. I believe that, applying a framework, your organization could even bring ‘corporate bullying’ in perspective and you can collectively decide as a company on which clients are you going to focus on.
Lastly, by implementing a management framework, your projects will be managed more consistently, your employees will be much happier, as their would be less stressful moments because there’s no need to ‘run all directions anymore’ to please a client. At least, that’s what I believe so far.
I hope more and more companies can rethink their management style, remove certain dependencies from their clients so that, at the end of the day, everybody can go home to their wives, husbands, children with a calm heart.
That’s it for today!