Here's what I observed.
Customer: "Our business performance isn't what we want. We think some of our intranet is no good."
Us: "We'd love to look at it."
Customer: "Not so fast. You can't 'look at it'. You have to propose a measurable change in business performance, define a fixed budget for that change."
Us: "To look at everything would cost you half a million dollars, or more, depending on how pervasive the problems are. We have to bring in the executive consultants, we have to observe the business in operation for a few months, product roll-outs, training, everything that impacts performance."
Customer: "We have $100,000 to spend."
Additionally, they included one of those "[X] will be performed after [Y]" sentences in the statement of work. Since it's a "weak passive-voice " construction, we have no idea who will be doing [X] or [Y], or what bearing it has on the project. Worse, the customer won't let us remove the sentence from the statement of work. We have to invest non-billable sales time to ferret out the real meaning behind this, since it doesn't describe something we're supposed to do.
Here's where things will fall apart: business is a mix of people, process, technology, funding and organization. They're asking us to fix one of the five elements. We can easily upgrade their technology. However, we can't easily retrain their people, redefine their business processes, adjust their budgeting priorities or change the responsibilities in the organization.
Let's say we put in brilliant web site changes and then they fire their training department. What now? How can we be answerable for business performance improvements when they've done more damage than we've done good?
While it's smart to look for measurable business improvements, you can't pin those improvements on technology change. We don't have authority to make changes that match our responsibility for improvement. I think that articles like this ("Management: Authority and Responsibility ") cover some of the bases. The article "Assign Responsibility and Authority " may be helpful also.
Having done some reading, I'm at a loss for a strategy that would get the two in synch. Either we should have our authority expanded to cover our responsibility for business improvement, or we should have our responsibility contracted to match our authority to make a few technical changes in their web pages.