Have you ever been in a situation like this? You’re invited to a party by a new acquaintance and want to show your gratitude by bringing a gift. After some thought, you decide to get a bottle of wine. You travel across town to a really nice wine shop and spend time selecting what should be the perfect bottle.
You arrive at the party with your gift nicely wrapped and present it to your host. He thanks you but barely looks at the wine before dropping it off in the kitchen, where it sits untouched for the rest of the evening. You turn as deep red as the Cabernet, realizing that your good intentions weren’t appreciated. Not to mention that you wasted your afternoon and fifty bucks. You should have found out if your host was a wine drinker first.
Here’s a similar scenario. Your team is committed to creating photographic documentation as part of the final deliverables on your most recent project. You’re eager to show off your team’s tech prowess. So, you decide to build a photo archive that the owner’s facility’s team can access over the web from your project management system, and direct the site super to send photos documenting weekly progress.
A month after delivery, you hear the owner remark that they don’t have the photo record they would have liked. As it turns out, he wasn’t interested in shots of what was completed each week. He would have preferred something they could use for marketing, such as a time-lapse video showing the project from start to finish. Ouch.
Lesson learned. Make sure you’re on the same page when it comes to photo documentation and deliverables. Find out what’s needed before deciding what to deliver. Otherwise, you risk the disappointment and wasted effort of good intentions that fall flat, and when all is said and done, you might as well have given them a photo of the completed project (and a $10 bottle of wine from the supermarket).