Wednesday, May 27, 2009

How Clients are in real life situations with Vendors

This video short called The Vendor Client relationship - in real world situations is very painful to watch and all too familiar. Negotiating more for less is one of the things that is ruining our technology economy. Similar to the issues associated with outsourcing everything. Chipping down your vendor all the time is not the way to go. I've been in this situation where you have to explain to some Clients that you indeed can't always get what you want for the same price. Just because they either F'd up or want more service for whatever money they have in their ill conceived budget or crap they changed their mind half way through the meal and ordered a new entree for the price of one meal. Time is always your best defense in these situations along with some pre-budgeting or allocating hours for the unknown. Let them know that you'd love to do something but we've run out of time or will need to devote more time because of their cascading changes. Now what makes it worse is in our job market with hundreds of well qualified candidates selling themselves for the same job these days there is a potential and the risk of underselling. With glut of great talent, I fear there is a lot of under bidding happening, with the same sort of self deprecating mentality. This is the opposite problem post 911 where folks were totally overpaid and had zero experience. So for the duration its a once again a buyers market, not a sellers market, where people will be perceived as effective individuals even though their requests are so ballsy it's hard to imagine them being able to sleep at night, and forget about having them understand caveats or roadmap for their requests. That's when the client turns deaf too!

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