It serves me right for writing a blog post such as ‘How to avoid losing 150M Euro‘. Just to show you I get things wrong on projects, here’s three mistakes that I made (and should have known better). They all come from a Sales application that we’re doing for a client.
- Don’t forget that IT projects are routine for you, but is often new to you (Internal / External) clients. This is closely related to …
- Doing IT Projects is your day job, but when your clients will leave a meeting they will have a stack of phone calls to return (and Sales Targets to meet).
- Your clients will (and should) have no idea of any technical term. They should not care what Java, Oracle, Ajax, XML or JBoss is. Even semi-technical terms like ‘drop-down list’ should be checked and explained if necessary. Your job is to explain the solution(s). The client’s job is to explain what they want.
This blog post was going to be called ‘why IT people are like Lawyers’ in that we both speak a semi-English language not understood by 99% of the population. We’re often about as popular , and only slightly less expensive. That’s probably an issue for another day.