Client Deliverables

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 01:55:38 GMT

Pattern: Client Deliverables

As a consultant, it’s easy to get caught up in the rush to accomplish the large goals of your project engagement. Whether you’ve been engaged to define a business strategy, craft a product roadmap, create a technical solution, bring multiple teams together, or any number of similar consulting projects, there can be a tendency to fill your time and narrow your focus toward a small set of things:

Achieving the project’s purpose as outlined in your Statement of Work.
Thinking that the primary due date is the completion date for your engagement.

There’s a problem with having such a narrow focus. Projects get canceled. Priorities and resources change during the project. Stakeholder teams get reorganized before the project is completed.

If your project gets canceled, you’ll be remembered for what you did, not what you were about to do.

If the project expands or narrows in its scope, your value to this newly-redefined project will need to be proven in a way that can seem like a new business development cycle.

If your stakeholders leave, get promoted, or change, your new set of contacts will have new opinions about what has value and what doesn’t.

But, you argue, I’ve been productive. I’ve learned so much about the problem. I’m more capable than ever of contributing now than I was at the start of this project.

You have to prove it.

The sad truth is, effort has minimal value. All the late nights and the challenges you’ve overcome don’t leave a shadow for others to see. You’re not an employee who will be reviewed by a manager who is slightly more likely to be paying attention to what you’re doing.

Client deliverables are your only evidence of your existence when you’r ethe consultant.

My wife and I each did contracts for the same agency at different times, and we both learned how important it was for that agency to transform effort into deliverables. You’d have a hallway conversation about an idea to solve some problem, and minutes later, the project lead would corner you, insisting on reframing your solution as a deliverable.

“Everything must be a deliverable” felt so unnatural that we joked that this company was in the business of creating “Deliverables by the pound.”

What are Client Deliverables? A Definition

Client Deliverables are work products—custom or technical artifacts—created on behalf of a client during the scope of your work as a consultant.

Let’s dig into this definition in more detail.

Work products are tangible works that you and others can both review. They exist after you have left the office. They can be digital. For software projects, this can be something really ephemeral, like improved performance of an application. But they are something that others can recognize as a result of work.

These are created on behalf of a client. They would not have ever happened if your client had not accepted your proposal. The invoices that your work produces are an exchange between your work and your client’s budget.

When you’re doing work in the role of a consultant, the proper attitude is that the work product is owned by your client, not by you. This includes patentable concepts, unique business ideas, technical solutions, designs, and more. They brought you to the project for your ability to create, and those creations ultimately belong to them.

Yes, you may come into the project with tools, templates, methods, or other materials that belong to you. These are formally defined as Consultant Materials. Legal definitions and how to keep your intellectual property separate from that of your client is outside the scope here, but suffice to say, the onus is on you to prove that it’s yours.

Client Deliverables : Examples

The variety of deliverables is vast, and any list of examples will surely miss large categories. That said, here are examples of client deliverables that I’ve seen:

Documents, Spreadsheets
Notes, sketches
Presentations
Media / Recordings
Software / Scripts / etc.
Graphics / Imagery / Data visualizations
Technical Designs / Design specifications
White papers
Reports
Documentation
Presentations
Training materials
Plans
Methodologies

Deliverables may be in draft form, they could be final products. Whether they are patentable or not, they constitute something that you leave behind and that your client receives.

The Value of Deliverables

Here’s the least obvious point: it doesn’t matter whether your deliverables have any value to the client.

If they do happen to have value to the client, that’s great, and it improves your chances of doing follow-on work.

If they aren’t valuable, then hopefully you’ve communicated well so that your client only remembers the deliverables that are valuable to them. Ideally, you’ve made it so easy for your client to ignore your non-valuable work products (by clean and organized delivery of things they value) that you’ve left a strong positive impression.

Deliverables are not strictly for your client. They’re for you.

How can something be for me even if I don’t own it? It’s an insurance policy protecting future-you from present-you veering too far away from what others care about. The deliverables prove your worth, demonstrate that you’re accountable to your stakeholders, and help you hone your own skills in the process.

Showing your work is the best way to ensure that you’ll get feedback, course-correct before it’s too late, and even learn more about the problem, about your client’s priorities, and the constraints that you need to consider as you proceed.

Welcome to Consultant Patterns

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 23:38:38 GMT

After almost three decades of experience, both as a consultant and as someone who has purchased consulting services, I’ve noticed patterns of skills that will contribute to, or take away from, any consultant’s ability to succeed in providing services to their clients.

First, let’s cover some definitions:

A consultant is someone who provides services to clients or client organization. Typically, this is someone who brings outside expertise that they provide following their own, self-directed processes and methods. Contrast this with a contractor, who is hired for their expertise, but who works at the direction of the client.
Consulting is the business of giving advice and services to organizations.
Patterns are recurring themes or general repeatable solutions to commonly occuring contexts. Here, we use the word “Pattern” in the same way that Christopher Alexander used it when he introduced the term ”Design Pattern“.