My largest client was one of Sydney’s top universities. We were working with each faculty to roll out new website templates that we had designed and developed.
I had already met with 3 faculties and we’d rolled out the templates with minimal fuss. So I was feeling confident that the same would be true for the next faculty.
I was contacted by Sue (not her real name), who was the website manager for one of the older faculties on campus. Sue was really keen to upgrade the faculty site with the new templates we had created. The site IA and design were a few years old and didn’t accurately reflect the brand. In addition much of the content was out of date and needed an overhaul. It sounded like a perfect fit.
Sue mentioned that there were a number of opinions within the faculty on how the new website should be approached. Given this is fairly typical I was confident we could engage the right stakeholders to deliver a great result.
I agreed to meet with Sue on campus, to chat about her requirements and take her through the new templates. When I arrived Sue greeted me and said she’d had to move the meeting from her office because it wasn’t big enough. The alarm bell in my head started ringing but I wanted to be accommodating so didn’t say anything.
I walked through the door and 20 people looked up at me.
AMBUSH!
My mind went blank and pretty much shut down. I couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. How did my meeting go from 1-on-1 to 1-on-20?!
I stumbled to my chair, which conveniently was in the middle of the gigantic rectangular table. Everyone went quiet. My instinct was to leave straight away but didn’t. Probably because my legs weren’t working.
Sue thanked everyone for coming. She said over the past few weeks a number of stakeholders had approached her with differing opinions on how the website project should proceed. So she thought it would be a good idea to get everyone in one room to discuss. And then she introduced me.
Wow. My heart sank. I was not prepared to run that kind of meeting. I had no idea who all these people were, why they were there and what they expected from me. The alarm bell in my head was deafening. I was trying to think about what I could do. I didn’t want to throw Sue under the bus (the view wasn’t that great from under there) and I didn’t want to waste everyone’s time.
So I asked if each person could introduce themselves - their name, their role and their involvement in the project. That would buy me some time to gather my thoughts and try to put a game plan together.
As we went around the room it became clear that these stakeholders hadn’t been included or consulted until now. There was a level of frustration and they were looking to me to help resolve it.
I realised that once the introductions were done I was going to have to stop the meeting. I just wasn’t prepared to run the meeting they were expecting. And with the level of emotion already in the room, it was probably going to get a lot worse, fast.
Finally the person to my right finished their intro and all eyes were on me. I explained who I was and the work that we were doing with the uni. I gave examples of recent projects we’d completed with other faculties. And I said it was great to see so much interest in the website.
And then I said that I hadn’t prepared to run the kind of meeting that I felt they all wanted. And that I didn’t want to waste their time. But that I would be happy to run a collaborative workshop, once I had consulted with Sue and we agreed on the best approach.
Silence.
Then Sue thanked everyone for their time and said she’d be in touch. I got the impression she was surprised at what I had said and probably disappointed. But I think (hope!) deep down she understood why I had to make that decision. The meeting finished and I walked out.
My next post will cover what I learned from this experience. And discuss a few techniques that I’ve implemented since then!
