choice

Client choice via a la carte menu (using spreadsheet)

Sometimes you want to give your client a variety of options to choose from the next phase of a project.  For instance, if you are developing a web site for a client, you may wish to discuss a variety of possible features to implement.  Since it can often get confusing for both the client and yourself when negotiating different features, one approach is to give the client a spreadsheet where they can try out different combinations of features to figure out what they want to pay for (this is especially useful when both you and the client have far more ideas than will fit in the budget).  By also providing the option of tentatively planning for future phases (as well as tentatively indicating items that the client will probably never want), the client can better envision what they will get in the future as well. 

One useful way to present this is in a spreadsheet where the rows represent the features and the columns represent different possible phases -- a particularly straightforward method for the client is to allow them to mark an "X" in columns to indicate what features should be delivered when (see example spreadsheet below).  This can be accomplished using the DSUM function in Excel and other spreadsheet programs (the example below uses EditGrid, although it can be downloaded to Excel if you wish). 

Here is a non-interactive example sheet (you can also play with an interactive version of this spreadsheet, including moving around the selections of features in each column/phase -- WARNING for Firefox users: if you are using Firebug disable it before going to the interactive version due to a bug in Firebug):