Everybody makes mistakes

People think they are entitled to a lot of things. Entitled to get what they want, and that other people understand what they mean, and they will help them with anything and everything. I don't think that's possible.

When you set requirements for the things you want to have or things you want accomplish, and find out you can't do it yourself, you bring people in to help you. You ask them of they can do what you want, and what they want for it in return. They can then do their proposals and ideas.

If you ask several proposals, you're bound to get several different ideas. That's a given, unless you standardize your requirements, and make the granularity of your requirements real detailed, and everybody understands what it all means. Those are a lot of conditions that need to be true.

More than likely thus you're gonna find that the proposals you're getting are not going to be exactly what you want. What I've found is that people become quite emotional in that case: people get insulted that the proposal clearly not understood their needs. And they berate the people behind the proposal.

Now, there's two things happening here. Proposals can be mismatched because the expectations between the two parties client and supplier are fundamentally different. A supplier can also be lazy, but let's keep a good mind about people for once. Proposals can also not match because a client's requirements have changed, have become more detailed. Anyways the proposal itself becomes the basis for discussion, so that more accurate descriptions can be made.

However when the emotion factor kicks in, you get accusations like "Why didn't so-and-so understand my needs? I was clear enough, wasn't I?" or "This guy clearly doesn't know what he wants." Now what I've found in business are the following points:

• a client cannot assume a supplier will surrender all his resources at a moment's notice just to help the client; clients often overestimate their own priorities over that of other clients
  
• clients must ask specifically when they find something lacking; getting angry because someone didn't give you what you wanted, when in fact you didn't ask for it, and you only assumed that people understood, is naive.
• suppliers that don't work like you want them to, should be told as such
  
• everybody makes mistakes