Just Give Me All I Want

 

Before we exit February and ProjectManagement.com’s theme of ethics, I wanted to touch on a somewhat counterintuitive aspect of project management ethics: those times that your customer behaves in an unethical manner.

I happened to see lots of bad customer behavior when I was working my way through my undergraduate degree, first as a waiter at a family restaurant attached to a huge shopping mall, and then later as a salesman in a department store at another huge shopping mall. In the project management world one rarely sees the transparent grubbiness of those mall shoppers who seek to exploit weaknesses in retail business models or the personnel executing those models, but some patterns do emerge that I believe carry over to our world.

Two characteristics are particularly noteworthy:

• The unethical customer will assume an attitude of superiority. We’re not talking your garden variety client/contractor relationship here – it’s far more imperial. For example, failure to honor a coupon well past its expiration date is guaranteed to bring about massive amounts of condescension from customers who simply assume you are too stupid to understand that they should be covered under the coupon’s terms anyway. These also tend to become rather aggressive when the hapless salesperson points out the obvious.
• The unethical customer is also supremely confident that they will eventually get their way if they demand to see higher and higher levels of management (and in many cases, unfortunately, they were right in this assumption). At some point a high enough strata of manager will realize that the cost of having some obnoxious person tie up their time and the energy of all the layers of employees who have been negotiating with them to this point simply isn’t worth it, and acquiesce to their unreasonable demands.

While restaurant and retail environs tend to bring out extreme instances of these behaviors, I believe they also exist in far more sophisticated project dealings – they’re just better camouflaged.

The two aforementioned characteristics will usually retain some giveaway phrases. For the first characteristic of the unethical customer, that of assuming an attitude of superiority, the reveal is the word “just,” as in “just perform a simple risk analysis.” If a risk analysis was called out in your project’s Statement of Work (SOW), then you pretty much have to do it (though the person who negotiated it might need a good talking-to). But if none of that risk management stuff shows up in the SOW, the nominal reaction of the PM would be to say “no.” Ahh, but there’s that word, “just.” Somehow the customer’s use of that four-letter word conveys that performing such an analysis is no big deal, trivial, even. Well, it’s not, connotative assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. But a further meaning being transmitted here is that “just” performing the analysis would be easy, if only the reluctant contractor wasn’t so incapable, don’t you know. If the contractor wasn’t so inferior, then the requested risk analysis would be easy. In fact, in order for the contractor to establish that he’s not a complete rube, the only option here is to perform the out-of-scope analysis – or so goes the insinuation of the unethical customer.

Then there’s the “all I want is” gambit. Nobody begins a request for a kajillion dollars or a marriage proposal with the phrase “all I want is.” This expression always precedes a request that the speaker views as simple and easy to fulfill, as if any reasonable person would agree – particularly and especially if that “reasonable person” happens to be the PM’s superior. By engaging such terms as “just” and “all I want is,” the unethical customer is attempting to get the PM to agree to scope creep, the most lethal of all project management pathologies.

Now, I’m fully aware that questions of ethics among customers and contractors is a two-way street, and am routinely condescended to by coffee baristas, just like everyone else. But, like I said, two things struck me about this particular two-way street, (1) unethical customer behavior doesn’t go away just because we’ve entered the realm of Project Management, and (2) the words “just” and “all I want is” tend to accompany the communications that precede such behaviors.

Of course, there’s a distinct possibility that the formulaic use of the terms “just” and “all I want is…” is perfectly innocent. That being the case, at this point all I want is to have my comment section flooded with praise for this blog. Can my readers just do that?