It is important to connect the dots

Recently I had the misfortune of overseeing a project that seemed it would be a big success-- but failed at the last minute. We had two talented developers, we accomplished all of our work just in the nick of time, and the work that was done looked very good.

Seems like a successful project no? The issue was that we didn't get paid for all the work we did. This made it unsuccessful from at least that point.

The root cause of the issue was my failure to "connect the dots". I told the customer we were adding another developer to the project in-order to get the work done in their time lines. I had warned them about that before hand as well. Since this was a Time & Material project this notification seemed sufficient to me. To me it was obvious, the customer disagreed.

When I used to write code, I always preferred to be explicit. That is, not rely on implicit casts or other operations. In this case, the increased cost was merely implicit in this case. Yes, they should have known, but I didn't mention it explicitly.

The lesson to learn out of all of this is that it is important to be explicit, and to connect the dots. This will leave no room for interpretation or mis-communication.