Today I was talking with a client and he was telling me a sad story.

Basically they fired their old IT company because they somewhat “tried to bank on them”, by asking too much money for simple things that would even fail to work as advertised.

All of this happened during an emergency situation that was caused by the lack of “futureproofing” of the product the IT company developed, so it was partly their fault to begin with.

What he told me (and I’ve agreed 100%) is that we often avoid communicating issues or failure. Instead we take different routes.
We fear shame, but in fact communicating that you won’t be able to finish the job properly is important too. If they did that, they might be still on the contract of the company, maybe for less things, but still working nonetheless.