I was talking to my wife about work, which I realize sounds incredibly boring but we find it interesting. Anyways, my wife is a partner in an accounting firm and she has been signing up a lot of new clients lately. We were talking about expectation management with clients, and how there’s an aspect of trying to clearly state what your deliverables and responsibilities are as a service provider, and what definition of done looks like for tasks you take on for them. She was talking about how in her field this can be extraordinarily complex.

Here’s an example. Let’s say she takes on a new client, a small retail business. The initial expectation is just reconciling books and filing federal taxes, but she talked about how there are additional financial obligations such as state sales tax collection. This puts her in an interesting spot with the clients, in that:

• Do they expect her, as their bookkeeper, to take of this for them?
• Does she ask them during initial client engagement?
• Do they even know about this extra requirement?
• How many OTHER requirements like this are lingering around?

This particular challenge is not unique to accounting, or technology, or any field, really. Let’s say you hire someone to do a new lawn in your backyard. Are you expecting a sprinkler system? A sidewalk? A fence?

The hard part is many of these “look around the corner” requirements only come from experience. If you are giving someone a new web-based application server, things like patching, logging, user account management, backups, are frequently overlooked because everyone is excited about the user-facing application’s functionality.

If you take on external clients, or even do broadly-scoped projects for external stakeholders, there’s value in capturing the hard-earned lessons learned of previous deployments and creating a standardized discovery checklist or questionnaire. Lessons learned frequently come at the cost of disappointed stakeholders, so make sure you grow from them to delight your future project stakeholders.