Articles - strategic process
The Six Conversations Every Client Should
Have With Their Project Partner Before Work Begins
Conversation 1: What Does Success Actually Look Like?
The most important conversation in any project engagement is the one that establishes what success means in concrete, measurable terms. Not ‘a great website’ or ‘a well-received app,’ but specific outcomes: the enquiry volume the website should generate, the user retention rate the app should achieve, the time-to-market that makes the business case viable. Without this conversation, delivery teams optimise for the wrong things. With it, every decision can be tested against a shared definition of what the project is for.
Conversation 2: Who Are We Building This For?
The target audience conversation is one that many Nigerian project engagements rush through leading to products designed for the client’s preferences rather than their users’ needs. A rigorous discovery process insists on developing a genuinely detailed picture of the end user: their demographics, their digital behaviours, their specific needs and frustrations, and the context in which they will encounter the product. This picture should be referenced at every subsequent design and development decision.
Conversation 3: What Are the Real Constraints?
Budget, timeline, and technical constraints are the scaffolding within which every project must be delivered. The conversation about these constraints should be honest and specific not aspirational. A client who underestimates their budget or overestimates their timeline is not setting up their project for success. A delivery partner who accepts unrealistic constraints without pushback is not serving their client’s interests. The constraints conversation should produce a shared, realistic picture of what is possible within the available resources.
Conversation 4: How Will Decisions Be Made?
Decision-making structure is one of the most overlooked sources of project delay and conflict. Who has approval authority on the client side? How quickly can decisions be turned around? What happens when stakeholders disagree? What is the process for managing scope change requests? Establishing clear answers to these questions before work begins prevents the kind of decision-making paralysis that adds weeks to project timelines and strains delivery relationships.
Conversations 5 and 6: How Will We Communicate, and What Happens When Things Go Wrong?
The communication rhythm conversation establishes the cadence and format of project updates how frequently progress is reported, through what channels, and what the client can expect to receive at each checkpoint. The risk conversation establishes what happens when things go wrong: what the escalation path looks like, how changes to scope are handled, and what the process is for resolving disagreements about deliverables. Both conversations are uncomfortable to have at the beginning of a project when optimism is high. Both conversations prevent far more uncomfortable experiences later when reality is more complex. At E15 Technologies Limited, we have all six of these conversations as standard because we know they are the foundation of every project that ends well.
Conclusion
The quality of a project’s outcome is significantly determined by the quality of the conversations that precede it. E15 Technologies Limited is committed to having every necessary conversation with honesty and rigour because your project deserves the foundation that those conversations build. Contact us today.
