The project
What kind of a project makes sense in this context?
It has to be a low budget production easily and quickly approved so we can start fast and end in a few weeks. No safety net necessary as a result.
Really, it's anything tech (Internet, web, IT, cloud, application), business (strategy, planning, sales and marketing) or professional services. There's a list of ideas, below.
The process
We want to accomplish something and, in the process, see if we collaborate effectively and lay the first stone of the foundation of a trust based relationship.
One of the key benefits of this approach is that it gives me a chance to see something of your business and have a better sense of needs and opportunities there are.
The result
If all goes well and you're pleased with the results, then we have a basis to go forward to another project with another modest budget, short turnaround time and clear business outcome.
Being paid at the end of the project is a good way to start or end a relationship.
This is a methodology I've found to work very well.
And if your gnarly project isn't so small …
Do you have a content monster lurking in your business?
Some big, chaotic, confusing but essential collection of reports, correspondence, spreadsheets and so on that you need to use but can't because it's scattered across a network and desktop drives, never been organized and is quite simply, a real mess?
In one project, a client organization had conducted some 50 projects over a five year period and now two senior executives were tasked with the responsibility of explaining and accounting for them. One had been peripherally involved in some of them. The other had had no involvement at all.
The prospect of reviewing and understanding the documentation was daunting if not downright terrifying.
The projects had involved several departments, a raft of vendors and consultants, and no central coordination or documentation standards let alone a central project management office of any sort.
They needed to bring together all of the thousands of files and create some way to organize it for use. It contained essential information that the senior executives needed to access but their lack of familiarity with the materials was a key problem. So it wasn't just gathering together and providing a directory. It needed organization and navigation designed by someone who understood the material and the kinds of queries the executives were likely to need to run. It was a tall order.
The solution was to inventory the documentation, find the latest versions and bring together in a central repository. We build a table of contents and a set of navigation aids as a static HTML internal website and then moved it and the documentation into an internal SharePoint site.