So often Business Analysts or Project Managers have to face customers who have been promised the world when the organization can barely produce a tenth of that world. And most of the time, it is really hard to tell the customer "no, we don't do that" or "no, we can't do that". But this job has to be done. Having faced this issue many times, I wanted to share with you some tricks on how to say "no" without saying "no". This is not an easy task to do, especially if you face angry customers. The good thing, however, is that as a business analyst, I have learned that bringing the customer in the process is always a the key to success in every projects and with good facilitation, I have learned a way to negotiate with the customer that gives them the power to say "no" to themselves without you having to utter it.
Here is the trick:
1. Baseline what you currently have: It's very important that you understand where you are with your product. What have you already developed? What are the components that are still under development and what are their functionality?
2. Understand your customer's requirements: You need to know exactly what is it that your customer is asking for in terms of business and system requirements. Performing a requirement analysis will help you accomplish this. It's important that you know the core functionality and users that the product will affect. Make sure you capture the functions the product must perform to support the core functionality of the business and the desired functions requested by the users.
3. Understand the gaps that exist between what you have and what they need: If you have a well documented product, this task is easy to do. If whoever your product is poorly documented, make sure you look research the functionality that the product supports and what it doesn't.
4. Analyse the impact of covering the gap (cost, time, & resource): Once you know how what is missing from the current system in order to satisfy your customer needs, translate this into numbers as far as how much it will cost your organization in monatary value, time and resource.
5. Present the result of the impact analysis to your customers: Since your customer will have to pay for this endeavor, by showing them the cost of the project, they can make their own decision. I have also found that if you give them several options, you can gear them toward choosing what will be a win-win situation. For example, instead of giving them only how much it will cost them for all their core functionality plus their desired functionalities, you may separate the two prices. If your customer is more concerned with immediate result, you may show them how breaking down the project by either functionality of certain components will give them what they want in the time that they want.
This approach allows you to channel the negative response back to your customer court without making your responsible for making the decision.
As a business analyst, even though you will find yourself making lots of recommendations and decisions, you will also find that you are the "fact messenger". When presented with a situation where you have to say "no" to your customer, don't be afraid to say "YES, let me give you some options on how we are going to do this and see how YOU would like to proceed"
