I All,Just a quick question to see how you would personally handle the following situation:You have promised to deliver to the client by a certain date. However, you needed input from one of the person's on client-side to make this possible.The particular person you need to speak to arranges a time to meet and then delays the meeting. Once you meet with them they tell you they only have a short amount of time and you do not complete what you must deliver to the other person on client side. They also have not been told about the urgency of the deliveryThis means you can't fulfil your promise? This causes the latter person to be put in an awkward position in a meeting. This is brought up in a conversation between you and the latter. What is the best thing to see in this situation. The last thing is to blame the client, but should I apologise in this situation, take the hit and work it out? What's your views?Thanks

This is probably the most common occurrence in my experience in consulting. I have lost count of the number of all-nighters I have worked due to customers delaying their input until the last minute. Something about deadlines.... If the client fails to act in time then point the finger.

Yeah, don't carry the can for some tardy client.Be honest - say you only just got the information from the client and therefore it's going to take longer before your report/analysis is finished. You can't be expected to work miracles. Do not slip into the habit of working overnight to meet deadlines which are under pressure because some member of the client team would rather be scraching their backside whilst gossiping at the coffee machine than getting their information to you on time! If you need to be diplomatic, say that the tardy client "had to delay our meeting and took longer to get the information to me than we had planned, owing to his/her other commitments".

Your engagement manager should be able to help you with this...a weak one will worry that this looks like non-delivery and will make the team work late to make it up. They wont dare "blame" the clienta strong one will be able to show the client that perhaps existing client-staff need additional support to participate in the project - guess what that leads to...?

This is certainly the biggest and most common difficulty you will face as a consultant... What happened in the end? Did you take the fall for it?