"It's not my job" is the line I hear most often on a construction site. I sometimes hear it from AV teams too.
When I walk into a rack room and find the top half of the rack clean and labeled and the bottom half a disaster, the customer usually has the same story. Someone came in for a refresh last year, and the new gear is the part that looks good. The crew that did that work was not wrong about their scope. They left the customer with a rack that looks half finished, and that habit is a large part of why our industry has the reputation it has.
I take a different approach, and I expect it from my team. If I am on a site walk and a display is dark because the HDMI cable is unplugged, I plug it in. I am not going to dispatch a service technician and send an invoice for that. If the customer's network is keeping our system from working, I approve the hours to work it through with their IT team. Sometimes we get paid for that work, and sometimes it is the cost of doing the right thing for a customer.
A few years ago I had a crew on site upgrading several conference rooms. Down the corridor, a town hall meeting was underway and the AV in that room was failing. My engineers walked over and got it working. It was not our system, and we never did get to refresh that room. Telling a customer who was having a bad day that it was not in our scope would have been the only thing they remembered about us.
The wireless access point in the photo serves only the AV system in that room, and it was hanging from the ceiling when we arrived. As we upgraded the room, we took it down and mounted it correctly. Nobody wrote that into our scope. It was the right way to leave the room, and it is the standard I hold my team to.
Strive for excellence.
