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Yes. Considering delivery in a professional services space, the main ones I met are:
- Work is non-core
- Work is non-core, and any resources that could perform the work are not available within the timeframes required.
- Work is non-core, and the job scope and size do not sustain hiring/sub-contracting to win that work.
- Mismatched requirements (or culture) needed to serve effectively.
- Eventual stopping of that line of work. In these cases, we inform early and help make it as easy as possible to find a partner who can take this on with the customer.
- The impact of taking on that work on existing workstreams.
- Time by when the solution needs to be shipped cannot be met.
- Customer discounting expectations could not be met.
- High-risk credit-rated customers that could not meet de-risking requirements.
- Unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved with the budget available.
- Unaligned ways of working – Work nature needed an agile approach and customer expected waterfall approach assurances (e.g. very common in RFP requests).
- Lack of customer executive/board support to commit to work.
- Internal maturity/stability at the customer causing continuous changes in requirements that could not be settled on as “stakes in the ground” against which we can price and offer a course of action.
- What the customer needed could not be delivered on time, spec, and expected quality because what was required was unclear even after several meetings.
