What do successful projects look like? Is it about profitability? Is it about making clients happy? A proud team? Or always hitting deadlines?

Success often means the avoidance of potential failures. And failure avoidance is about surfacing and mitigating risk.

Risk to project delivery comes in many forms. Complete failure is luckily rare. Most project risks only reduce the amount of success that can be achieved, and value that can be created.

Modern agencies serve many concurrent clients. Every one is different. They come with distinct requirements and people. Every project is unique. With new outcomes and deliverables.

Risk needs consideration and review before every new project.

A new client walks through your door with a big pot of money and no plans for how to spend it. A rare creature indeed.

More likely, the client will share some details about what they see a project creating and the reason for their business needing it.

You might call these initial details sandcastles. The plans may look well-defined and considered, but it’s not ready to be a forever thing. 

They may have been planned without any evidence that it will actually work. It could be lacking input from people with the right experience. It might be too simple or too complex. There are plenty of opportunities to discuss making changes to the plan or even starting again.

How can we deliver Value to a client unless we share an understanding of what Value means for the project?

We’ve all heard of “Good Value for money” and that something can itself be valuable. But how does the language fit into our project delivery and client management approach?

Projects start in different ways, but they all need to have one thing in common. Whether the client brings you a simple vision for the work, or they hand over a detailed 200-page specification, you still want to understand how to return the most value you can in the time available.