throwconsultant

> Usually at the end of the first week, I'll do an email or a meeting with a summary of what's been done and where things are going to reassure myself they'll be happy being billed with the work so far.

I did the same thing outlying what's done in the 3 week that I did so that they know where their money is going.

> I'm guessing you don't feel great right now and keep thinking about this. I find it best to just write down what you would do differently next time and try to move on because there's no point overthinking it.

Yes. I definitely feel like shit. Gladly, I'm a positive person and now just making sure I do better on the next project. My consultancy still has other clients at the same time launching our own product in a month with our product team so hoping for the best all around.

The feedback here has been super comforting despite everything so thanks to all!

Not sure everybody will like this answer. Since tensions have increased, I just took the blame and said that how I handled this engagement was not professional (communication and management) and for me to just take "hit" and not get paid.

I took this option so that relationships are not severed and just a learning moment for myself.

Honestly I'm now at my lowest point now since I never had negative feedback on my work even at times where I winged it. To give some context, I also have a side project that a 100k daily users, and some open source contributions to add to that. So technically I can assure that my technical skills are on point. Just unfortunate that this happened.

Thanks for the feedback. What's funny is I actually tracked the previous engagement with them meticulously. I just based this new one on trust and feedback through constant communication, since I worked with them in house.

There was no sign of me not doing my job well until I started to bill, all the issues came out.

I completely agree with your comment 100%. This has been a learning experience for me. I was just disappointed that everything "seemed" to be moving right along and was only notified that I wasn't performing to the expectations the moment I billed.

On the previous engagement, yes. This time, no.

This is all because we know each other and have had a previous professional working relationship. Everyone that worked there pretty much became my friends also.

A previous engagement that has the same terms of payment but this time, without scope and SoW.

There is none. There was a project scope

- finish company service (given their not clean data)

- finish integration with X api

- finish integration with Y api

and that would be finished in 4 weeks.

I finished all of those and apparently was not enough because they thought it was me not being a "consultant" by not helping cleanup the data and therefore everybody was delayed.