Consultants are brought in by a client for many reasons and one of the key reasons is their expertise and methodology.  Most firms have their own standards and the consultant needs to develop a balance between following the client’s standards and the firm’s standards that the client may want to adapt.

What are the types of standards where you run into conflict with the client?

It often depends on your role in the project.  I work in IT consulting, so we do custom software development.
We have a certain set of coding standards that we follow, but when we go to a client to develop software for them, they may have a different set.  We need to reconcile that with them and determine which standards we’re going to follow on the project.
We may feel that we have a better set of standards, but the client needs to deal with the lack of consistency of having one of their applications developed under a different standard.
We also deal with it for documentation.  Some clients have standards for how documents are created such as templates for business requirements or technical designs.  It may be as simple as the template used, but they may also require specific sections with other details.
Most consulting firms have their own standards for all of these documentation formats and the type of content that is provided.
So there is often a gap with those types of standards
Project management consultants my have their own standards for their methodology. I’m a project manager myself, and I tend to run into a lot of standards differences between things like status reporting and how we structure meetings at the client.

How do you reconcile these types of differences in standards?

It generally varies based on how strong the client’s preference is.  It can also depend on why the client brought the firm in.
For instance with the coding standards issue I just mentioned.  The client may agree 100% that the consulting firm’s coding standards are better and more efficient, but they just don’t want to deal with the inconsistency after they take on the responsibility of their staff maintaining the code after the consultants leave.
Consistency is really the whole reason for having coding standards.  They have maintenance programmers that support all of their applications.
If they can count on a certain amount of uniformity in their coding and naming standards across all of their applications, they can more efficiently maintain them.
I’ve always heard it said that a bad standard is better than no standard at all.
So consultants going into a client need to find out what can you do and what can’t you do that you might be used to including in your code.
Now if the difference has to do with documentation standards, it’s a little similar to the coding standards.  If the client’s executives are used to seeing business requirements or design documents in a certain way, they may be more stringent about you doing it their way
I’ve seen situations where the firm and the client have different standards and we’ll sit down and reconcile them.  We’ll maybe use their template, but add sections from our document to make sure we cover all of the critical aspects.
As a project manager, I have my company’s standard status report that I’m used to using.  I’ve had clients that have a standard status report that they want me to use.  But I’ve had others that have no standard and look to us to provide the standard.
There are times where we treat it like the documentation and create a combined hybrid of their standard and ours to make sure we report all the pertinent information.
It’s a matter of sitting down with them up front and decided on a project standard together.
At my last client, I would submit our standard status report to them each week and they would cut and paste all of the information into their web-based standard reporting tool.  It seemed a little bit redundant to me, but that worked wel