Week 6: Being Assertive. Or Not
Project Changes Are Also Relationship Game.
Monica quickly fixed the things on the project and got back on track. She started to smile again and focused on advancing the project.
The next week she received a call from her customer Olivier. He did a small talk about the project status, and then dumped the bomb: Slow'n'happy wants to refresh it's logo design.
The Challenge: Late Change Request Monica knew from her past experience that late change requests happen. And most of the time there is a rationale behind it. However doing rebranding while an advertising campaign critical for the quarterly revenue has been already advanced is not a simple thing. Movies has been already recorded at a restaurant with old logo. Publishers already received advertisement drafts with old logo. Website colors were adjusted to the old logo.
Monica became overwhelmed by the situation and consulted the issue with her boss. The boss decided to request an appointment on senior management level, with Chief Executives of both sides. She told that such a meeting is called steering committee sometimes.
This was the first C-level meeting Monica participated in. She was excited although she has not understood everything. But the key message was: the rebranding was postponed to next quarter.
The next day Olivier called and he was more than just angry that she killed his rebranding initiative.
The Problem: Customer Is Not Always
Right
I do not believe that customer is always right. There are many cases when the customer is not right and cannot be right, especially in businesses like marketing, product development and consulting, where the results are intangible and depend strongly on subtle details.
Relationship Game
Monica and her boss played the game almost right. They noticed an essential, late change request to their project and launched the right tool, the steering committee. But the one step wrong was not to identify the force field. It appeared after the rebranding decision was reverted, that her major partner was also emotionally engaged into the idea of rebranding, and took significant role in defining the new visual identity. Probably Monica should firstly convince Olivier to postpone the rebranding initiative, and then present the proposal together. This would help Olivier to save face, and Monica would avoid the resistance.
Here are