How to Turn Customer Constraints into Technical Objectives | Wireless Network Design Tips

There’s the customer you always dread. The one who always seems to come up with some novel way to make you cringe with the asks they bring to the table or an off-the-wall environment. Sometimes it’s even worse. They bring up the dreaded budget.

Today, we’re going to discuss a few strategies about turning these requests into something you can work with as a wireless engineer.   

Defining Constraints and Technical Objectives

A constraint limits what you can do with your work. It’s something the customer mentions that changes your design. These aren’t always as clear cut as “We can’t put X here” and sometimes, often even, you have to drag it out of your customer entirely. How to drag it out of your customer is a different conversation entirely. But knowing that, what then is an objective?

There are two main types of objectives that the aspiring wireless engineer needs to be aware of: Technical and Business. The easiest way to put it is this — if it’s a line item or can be made into one, it’s a business objective or both.  

Business objectives can overlap, but typically they are something the business is expecting you to enable them to accomplish. Examples may be “Keep it under $X” or “Enable us to keep on a call when we walk to accounting from sales” or “Make sure for legal reasons that the Sales CAN’T contact accounting’s resources”. 

They advance the business’ interests and achieve a goal that generally (but not exclusively) don’t directly call for a change in technical language. Beware of things like the second example that may fall into both.

Technical objectives are things that directly affect the systems that you engineer, which is the second example from above. Other examples may even be nice enough to be tailored for you, such as “Coverage over X area of X strength” or “Roaming efficient enough to not be noticeable (<100 ms max, though 25 is even better…)” 

The nice thing about them is that they’re usually fairly clear at the outset. However, try to never allow for wiggle room because your job is to force precision.

How to Turn Constraints into Objectives: Force Precision

Never let them be something that you can be talked into changing after the scoping meeting. Ask for details. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the adage goes. Here what you want to focus on is numbers. Do not let them give you adjectives like “Fast” or “good”- these are open to interpretation and lead to scope creep in every single example, or if you’re particularly unlucky, a lawsuit. 

Your job as an engineer is to know what is reasonable to substitute in the scoping meeting to prevent this. A good place to grab high-level knowledge is by earning your Certified Wireless Design Professional certification. If you want a more broad scope, the Certified Wireless Network Administrator is a good bet.

Don’t be afraid to advocate for yourself and your team here. The more you redo, the less profit you and the company take home and the less happy your customers are at the end of the day. Multiple jobs from one customer and referrals are much, much better than a single ‘great’ payday. And more ethical.

Don’t Make Assumptions

Remember, your customer rarely will understand the ins and outs of wireless networking much less be an engineer. They know what they want to happen, you know how to make it so. For your protection and theirs, go over everything: timeline, an iron-clad scope, and who is paying for, delivering, and billing supplies.

Does your customer think they’re getting the job essentially half price, because they don’t have a bill of materials? That’s a problem. In this scenario, think about the price constraint. You need to address cost escalation and factors that may increase over time. 

By applying our consultant alchemy, which involves transforming constraints into objectives, the translation becomes, “ Provide me with a design that will fit my budget”. This may mean job takes longer because you have fewer hands.

Be Willing to Compromise

Compromise can be a great thing — you just need to make the customer aware of it. Like the well known triangle of speed, quality and expense (Pick two!), it’s something that has absolutely got to happen. Don’t trade away your margin because your customer needs it cheaper. Advise them on ways to do that and most importantly how that will affect the design. 

Ninety percent of the time, they are fine with it; the other 10% they simply aren’t aware what things cost. The best target to turn constraints to objectives here is to target the gaps. For example, if they express a need for 'Coverage all the way in the front drive,' does that mean they may not require coverage in the back or the stockroom? Best practice is to offer a 'Good, better, best' solution, where the proposal you want them to take is the middle, and the best is a moonshot.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully this has helped you untangle a few things. Soft skills and the overlap between them and hard skills are always difficult. Don’t be afraid to lean on seniors or even the people who do this all the time to learn. Sales and engineering aren’t always friends. But it’s to your advantage to try to have a working relationship with sales. For the hard skills, why not give the CBT Nuggets training a try? You’ll find a wide variety of wireless networking courses and more!