Over a coffee (Tea in my case), I was speaking to a freelancer the other day about a project which had just been cancelled on him.  In fact, it wasn’t just cancelled – he had delivered it after weeks of work to be told the five worst words we all dread to hear – “We want our Money Back”.   Apparently, everything that could be wrong with the delivery was wrong.   The client would not even speak with this poor chap.

It turns out his mistake was simply not to ask enough questions.   He had asked a few at project kick off, but he wanted to maintain that “I know what I am doing” illusion – so the questions had been few and far between.

This was a mistake I made when I first started my own business – but I learnt that lesson quickly through my own pain.   Now, I have what I call my Never Ending Question Sheet.

It works like this – I do very similar projects over and over again.  So what I have is a list of questions in an excel spread sheet for each type of project.  As an example, for a data base project, I will ask questions about the source of data, is there other data sources (spread sheets, access databases etc), versions of database, is it due for an upgrade, any unusual (foreign)  characters, is it encrypted, etc.

Whenever I am working on a project, if something happens or which I have not asked about before, I just add it to my question sheet – it then builds up over time and gets better and better with each project.

When the next project comes in and I need to bid, I have a set of questions ready – a quick review to make sure I am not asking anything irrelevant, and it gets sent off.

This has saved my bacon 4 or 5 times in the past.  On one occasion, it triggered the client to reveal a whole host of extra work which raised the price (without this discovery, I would have had an awkward conversation about extra funding half way through the project).  On another occasion, I won the work and the client said it was down to the quality of the questions I had asked.

My friend has taken this advice on board, and has started his own question sheet.