Consulting Journal: Trends - Exceeding expectations

Trends: Exceeding expectations

by David Blakey

Is the practice of exceeding your clients' expectations good?

[Monday 30 June 2003]

Some consultants talk about ‘giving the client 110%’ as if this were a desirable outcome. I would like to examine this approach, tell you a personal story, and then recommend some actions for you.

I first saw the 110% goal used by a group of business process re-engineering consultants. They may have used 105% instead of 110%. It doesn't matter. They had a goal of giving the client more than the client expected. Their thought seemed to be that this was something that the client would appreciate.

Let me tell you my story.

My experience

I worked in the middle east for an oil company. At that time, I was a systems analyst and I did some programming as well, when it was needed. I supported the materials management function of the company, which handled everything from complete oil rigs to packets of breakfast cereal.

We had a lot of surplus material. Some of this was large machinery; some was drums of paint. It was all stored and accounted for. The summary report that listed the value of all the surplus material had four columns of figures. At the bottom right was the total value of all the surplus material, which was approximately $460,000,000. You may find it surprising that a company could have that amount of money in surplus material. But this was a major oil company in an extremely rich middle eastern country.

The report was changed. Instead of four columns, it was changed to have five columns. The change had been approved and signed off, and the changed report was in production. There was one problem. The totals at the end had not been changed. So the main report contained five neatly spaced columns, and the totals at the end contained four neatly spaced columns, which did not line up under the five columns above them.

We received a request from the user to amend the report to have five columns of totals. I decided to do the changes myself.

Each of the columns was defined as ZZZ,ZZZ,ZZ9, which meant that leading zeros were suppressed. Between each column was a number of blank spaces. Let's say that there were four blank spaces between each column. It would be possible to ‘pad’ the numeric fields to the left, over those four blank spaces, by changing the definition to ZZZ,ZZZ,ZZZ,ZZ9. The additional ‘ZZZ,’ to the left of the definition would replace the four blank spaces.

By using five identical definitions, the five columns could be accommodated.

So I removed the spaces in front of each definition. The five new totals were aligned under the five columns. I tested the change on our test database, and then ran a test on the live database. The total value of all surplus material was $4,640,000,000. Four billion dollars of surplus material had suddenly appeared.

I checked the figures and found them to be correct. The real value of surplus was more than seven times than we had previously reported.

Lessons

Now, my 100% had been to align five columns of totals with five columns of figures. It was not my job to improve the coding. I should have done my 100% and not aimed for 105% or 110%.

The same is true of consulting assignments. There is an expectation by the client, which is the 100% that you should deliver. If you were only able to deliver 90%, you would have failed to complete the assignment. If you deliver 110%, you have also failed. The client expects 100%, and you should deliver precisely that.

Reasons

Understanding

The first reason for delivering only 100% is that it shows that you understood the brief. If you deliver more, it can appear that you have misunderstood the brief.

Scope

It can also appear that you did understand the brief and that the brief was inadequate. This implies that you did not prepare the brief carefully, and have had to spend additional time on completing what the client needed.

Value

If you had agreed to charge $x per hour for y hours work, then delivering more than y hours for $xy reduces your effective hourly rate. This looks inconsistent. A perceptive client may even ask for a lower rate next time, based on the calculation that if you do 110% of y for $xy, you should do the next job for an hourly rate of 90% of $x.

Utilization

It can appear that you had spare time and nothing better to do with it than to continue working for the client for free. There must have been better things that you could have done with that time.

New work

There may even be a suspicion that you had some ulterior motive in doing additional work and not charging for it. A client may imagine that the additional work is part of setting up a further assignment, and that this explains why you could not charge for it.

My advice

As you can imagine, my advice is to avoid all discussion of giving clients 105% or 110% of what they expect. Concentrate your efforts on the 100%. That is often difficult enough.

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