People do petty stupid things.
My priors align with the client having unreasonable expectations and then squabbling over the inconsequential bill. That is totally a thing that clients sometimes do.
My priors align with the client having unreasonable expectations and then squabbling over the inconsequential bill. That is totally a thing that clients sometimes do.
When your project blows up, the professional thing to do is to resolve the problem with the client before billing another hour over the SOW. The common, crazy thing to do instead is optimistic invoicing: the client must share our priors, we're all reasonable people, so we'll just implicitly revise the SOW to match our learnings on this project and proceed, prioritizing what we believe would be a successful delivery of the project over everything else. That rarely works.
Serious consultancies routinely eat billable weeks of time in order to meet client success criteria and retain relationships.