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> difficult client Olympics for the last 5 years. We've missed so many deadlines > many of our clients (banking). I have been a couple of times on the other s

> difficult client Olympics for the last 5 years. We've missed so many deadlines > many of our clients (banking). I have been a couple of times on the other side of the fence, feeling like difficult vendor olympics, same industry. Difficult, like in wondering why the f#ck we are having so massive performance problems with our parallel computation engine, only to one day realize that the vendor has decided that it is a Very Good Idea (tm) to send computation requests to the engine not parallel, but in series, and not asynchronously, but synchronously. Yep, lots of rewriting there. > For whatever reason these customers do not want to walk away from us. We think they actually like the product. Sorry to be blunt, but it is unlikely they like the product. In the best case they hope that the product will be okay one day. Internal politics are much more likely reason why they do not walk away. In that case someone would need to admit they made a mistake. As long as there is hope, they can just blame someone else (most likely you, that is:)

beefield 5y ago
> Internal politics are much more likely reason why they do not walk away. I think I need to add a couple more possible reasons here. One is that your customers know at that point how painful project it was to just make a decision on the vendor. Likely just that part of the project took years. They are very reluctant to start that from the scratch. Second one is that they very likely already have a good grasp on the competing vendors. Almost surely they were evaluated during the process you were selected. And they were not chosen. Either they were much more expensive or your customer is even less confident that they could deliver something in time. So they are stuck with you. And pissed. And of course, the requirements were written in committees after committees where everyone had more important things on their mind, so they should very much be pissed at themselves, but I think that level of self awareness is quite rare in the decision making bodies.

beefield 5y ago

> Internal politics are much more likely reason why they do not walk away. I think I need to add a couple more possible reasons here. One is that your customers know at that point how painful project it was to just make a decision on the vendor. Likely just that part of the project took years. They are very reluctant to start that from the scratch. Second one is that they very likely already have a good grasp on the competing vendors. Almost surely they were evaluated during the process you were selected. And they were not chosen. Either they were much more expensive or your customer is even less confident that they could deliver something in time. So they are stuck with you. And pissed. And of course, the requirements were written in committees after committees where everyone had more important things on their mind, so they should very much be pissed at themselves, but I think that level of self awareness is quite rare in the decision making bodies.