Typical BPO and IT outsourcing projects are highly complex. Clients are demanding. Some clients believe I pay therefore I decide.
But what are reasonable and acceptable expectations?
Is it reasonable to require service providers to submit their bids between Christmas and New Year’s eve or the day after Diwali?
Is it reasonable to demand an account manager to prepare a quote prior to Friday 4 PM, while you know you will read the offer earliest on Tuesday because of a long weekend?
In another post I will argue that unlike undergoing complex surgery, chances of dying while working in BPO or IT outsourcing projects are slim.
However, those chances are not zero.
In one of my projects it so happened that a member of a service provider’s bid team crashed into a tree late at night. He returned home from a long day of finalizing the bid just before the orals. Apparently he had worked so hard and had slept so little that week that he was exhausted and nearly killed himself in the accident.
The project had a tight deadline. The Dutch parliament had ruled that the project’s deliverable, a national web application, had to be live on the first of January. Therefore, the project team and subsequently the bid teams were under a lot of pressure to deliver on time. As a result, a second casualty occurred. One of the project members literally collapsed because of the pressure and was off ill for a longer period.
Is this acceptable? Or should deadlines be shifted?
A less brutal but nonetheless frequent example of poor planning is clients who require service providers to prepare quotes or reports before a certain cut off time. Now that in itself is perfectly fine.
The trouble starts when those clients decide to be in all day meetings the entire week, while the service provider needs some air time to better understand the requirements and to bounce off ideas.
It gets worse when those clients decide to go on a long weekend and only review the quote days later than the cut off time.
Years ago I was in a similar situation. My client asked me to prepare a complex email that he could send out to senior stakeholders. He relied on my writing skills. He asked me to complete the email before Friday 4 PM. So I put in a lot of effort to finish the task on time and was happy to share and discuss the result with him… to find out at that point that he had already left the office for a long weekend. He didn’t even bother to inform me…
Can you imagine how frustrating and demotivating that is?
Therefore, I have decided a long time ago to abide by the adage: “poor planning on your end doesn’t mean stress on my end”.
I’d encourage you to consider such an approach as well.
Note: In a later post I will address poor planning on the part of service providers and the resulting frustrations on the client side.
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