I subscribe to a Dilbert delivered internet thingy and I look forward to Dilbert skits that arrive in my mailbox from time-to-time.

Today's is rather humorous to me because I've been in this exact situation. However, I knew the perfect way to get out of the infinite loop from hell.

Problem: My situation was while I was doing some project management. The Client was never happy with the project documentation I was submitting. His nit-picking involved only the documentation, not the project itself. Insufficient detail apparently, including format, font, colour etc. However, it was becoming more time consuming to continually redo minutiae in the documentation than to actually complete the project.

Solution: Increment the project management bill at an hourly rate as applicable to the documentation updates.

From memory my PM hourly rate was around AU$160. The dollar figure for the project increased by this amount with each submission. At the time I wondered how long it would take for said Client to figure out what was going on. It took him 4 revisions, after which he accepted the final submission and the project was completed to spec... on time and on budget.

I never had that problem again with that Client. Many others, but not that one.

Incidentally I think the project was for the replacement of 5 Servers and 1000 workstations, including SOE design and rollout.