Towards the end of the last week I met a client over a meeting to present a project proposal for a project for which we have quoted for. Even though he seemed quite comfortable with IT related project proposals he was very polite to ask us a simple question. It’s like this….

‘ You’ll have separated and identified different aspects of the system as modules. For me, this is one big business process where nothing is optional, as we need all these aspects of the system to function as a business entity. Therefore why do you separate the business process and call them modules.’

One thing here is to note that even though we had modules identified, we never costed for separate modules.
Had we done that It would have really baffled him, as his perspective of the system as one, then becomes a total contradiction in our proposal as we have costed for separate modules which is then sumed to arrive at the full cost of the project.

We in IT will have ‘our’ modules basically for the sake of clarity as well as brevity. But what really matters is whether we convey the real message to all stakeholders of a project (specially when a knowledge gap exists between the client and the IT people) in a way where every party gets the confidence that ‘everyone knows what everyone is up to’.