Do you have Champagne Taste, but a Beer Budget?

I heard this saying from someone recently and it really struck a chord with me.

When it comes to e-learning, sometimes the desire is high to build something really slick or extensive or just darned big, but the budget is tiny.  That’s champagne taste vs. beer budget. On a recent #lrnchat, (check May 26th transcript) we discussed how to show your clients what’s possible. Comments ranged from wanting to educate clients on all of the options or things that could be done when they asked only for a course to a sense that dealing with the demands was hard enough and there was a need to scale back some of the superfluous “interactivity”.  I think one thing that is really important is to focus on the outcome. What do people need to do differently as a result of your e-learning?

As much as the Anti-Next Button crowd would like the slide based e-learning to go away, there isn’t really any reason to throw out the baby with the bath-water. I think one of the interesting approaches is to help the client/requestor see the big picture of their request.  Some thoughts…

• Maybe this is the situation where you really do want to “blow the budget”, since it is critical to your organization’s strategy execution. You may not do anything else, but that might be ok.
• Perhaps you help the client see there’s a more modest approach that will affect performance and they should save their money/time/resources for other stuff.  Or, maybe that’s just my approach (I am obviously not a very rich consultant!).
• You could show “bronze/silver/gold” options to the client.
• You could do a fixed fee project and timebox your development, effectively putting a cap on time/money spent.

I’m curious to know: How do you deal with champagne tastes vs. beer budgets?