Client Management Primer

Although I deal with clients and help them to plan out and implement projects, most of them are reasonable, unlike those described in this funny piece by Shae Allen.

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

Lots more where that came from.

In our business, we generally either get very prescribed scopes of work, two paragraph emails or incomprehensible phone requests on which we have to work with to develop a scope and technical proposal, cost estimate and schedule. Compared to the design and architecture field it seems we have it easy.