If you are implementing B2B Fintech solutions, what’s your main frustration? For me it was always one – “does it also make coffee?” (The misalignment of expectations with the client)
You worked hard with your team to prepare, you have the resources lined up, you read through the scope and signed off on it, and then it hits you. It can be:
- “But the demo had that other feature…”
- “Your solution needs to replace our spreadsheet, you need to add all of the capabilities that we built in over the years…”
- “We cannot test this, we don’t have the capacity/knowledge/will…”
- “We thought that you oversee all of the related projects that we have…”
These challenges sit in two main buckets – scope and ownership.
Scope gets agreed before the project starts, but often assumes existing product capabilities, and without these being perfectly documented, the client is left guessing (and requesting). This problem can be solved by a very standard demo env that Sales and Delivery lean on.
Ownership contentions are less frequent, but not less challenging. One example is when your project, as a vendor, is part of a bigger change on the client side, and the client for some reason expects you to be the system integrator (SI). I had this once, it was so clear to them and so unclear to us that it wasn’t even raised as an issue at first. The other example was with a particular hedge fund not understanding and not prepared for their responsibility when running a regulatory solution.
To clear up any ownership/responsibility disagreements ahead of time, I found that a vendor-client ownership matrix, similar in concept to RACI, that was added to the contract did the trick. We made it a must-have for regulatory projects.
But most importantly, with the morning coffee, or in the weekly catch-up with the team, we need to ask ourselves again and again, are we on the right path to deliver the client’s coffee machine, or are we building them a juicer? Are we on the same page?