Project Management — Don’ts series #3
In this article we get to some of the less focused aspect of project management, our customers. While the entire project is to serve the needs of the customer, there are few aspects of the customers and their interactions that can impact the success of the project. When we talk about project management, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical stuff and forget about the folks we’re actually doing it all for. But truth is, how we deal with them can make or break the whole initiative. So, it’s important to pay attention to things like how we talk to them, making sure we really understand what they want, handling their feedback well, and just generally making them feel heard and appreciated. If we get that part right, the project is much more likely to be a success.
Customer could be a King or Queen but they can be served better only with proper feedback. Many projects do spend enough time and money to engage customer for their feedback, survey or even some testing. So what’s the Don’t for a project from a customer. It is simple, customers should not deny the opportunity to share their experience with the project. For the customer , the care factor is very less , as their core business does not rely only on the project. It will serve them very well that technically they fund the project.
Further, in the area of customer engagement there could be several pitfalls that the project should navigate carefully. In this article I am going to focus on the flow of information from external to internal. While a project cannot make it mandatory for this flow of information , this is very critical. Ambiguous surveys , incomplete feedback , lack of detail of the pain points are a foreteller of the future rollout of the project. Again, it is not possible for the customer to be aware of all the complexities of the project, they need to arm themselves to know the fundamentals. You reap what you sow mostly.
Let us say building a public park is a project that reaches to you, the customer , a family man with two school going kids. While your life does not pivot around your neighbourhood park , it will be critical you understand what they features they are building. As a parent would you not be interested to know will you have enough walk path or gym equipment to keep even you engaged, availability of toilets and how they will be maintained, first aid kit availability, lighting, security controls so much more. You certainly need not know how to build the park, the cost, resources — human and material required or safety standards to be met etc. But you will fail the project if you were to give a disinterested feedback on the features or your key focus items. You might need to be empathatic to your fellow customers who probably don;t have the benefit that you received to provide a direct feedback. For the least interested, at the end of the day, the public park is paid by the exchequer on behalf of the tax payer, YOU.
In the next article we will focus how the project manager and the team can ensure that these aspects are controlled. Interested to know how a customer of your project impacted it positively or otherwise. How you as a customer engaged with a project. Do you know the customer’s responsibility?
