How to deal with poorly informed customer choices [closed]

Question

Here's a scenario I'm sure you're all familiar with.

1. You have a fairly "hands off" customer, who really doesn't want to get too involved in the decision making despite your best efforts.

2. An experienced development team spend hours discussing the pros and cons of a particular approach to a problem and come up with an elegant solution which avoids the pitfalls of the more obvious approaches.

3. The customer casually mentions after a quick glance that they want it changed. They have no understanding of all the usability / consistency issues you were trying to avoid in your very carefully thought out approach.

4. Despite explanations, customer isn't interested, they just want it changed.

5. You sigh and do what they ask, knowing full well what will happen next...

6. 3 weeks later, customer says it isn't working well this way, could you change it? You suggest again your original solution, and they seize on it with enthusiasm. They invariably seem to have had a form of selective amnesia and blocked out their role in messing this up in the first place.

I'm sure many of you have gone through this. The thing which gets me is always when we know the time and effort that reasonably bright and able people have put in to really understanding the problem and trying to come up with a good solution. The frustration comes in contrasting this with the knowledge that the customer's choice is made in 3 minutes in a casual glance (or worse, by their managers who often don't even know what the project is really about). The icing on the cake is that it's usually made very late in the day.

I know that the agile methodologies are designed to solve exactly this kind of problem, but it requires a level of customer buy in that certain types of customers (people spending other peoples money usually) are just not willing to give.

Anyone any clever insight into how you deal with this?

EDIT: Oops - by the way, I'm not talking about any current or recent customer in this. It's purely hypothetical...

Answer 1

Make your customer pay by the effort you are putting into designing and developing the solution to their problem.

The more you work, the more you get. The customer will have to pay for his mistakes.

Customer will eventually learn to appreciate your experience and insight in the programming field.