Project Management — Don’ts series #4
Customer engagement is a critical activity of any project, as customers are the final recepient of the project delivery.In the previous article, we discussed the flow of information and feedback from customers to the project team. The quality of the information received is entirely dependent on how the customers are engaged and what role they are requested to perform. Therefore, it is the project’s responsibility to define this engagement. Neglecting this aspect can lead to post-delivery issues with the project.
As we agreed that the customers respond to the engagement of the project, their roles have to be clearly established.Treating the customer as an ordinary stakeholder without seeking detailed feedback or suggestions can result in missed opportunities. The choice of correct customer base is also where most of the projects fail. They try to identify “friendly” and “accomodating” customers so that if the project has any issues it does not impact the “brand” and can be managed. The play safe model will not yield desirable results and the project will end up not identifying the real pain point.
For example, in one project, government authorized agents were engaged to operate the system on behalf of their customers. The cohort of advisors engaged were very interested to know the system and “learn” how to use. The sessions were not filled with trying to work through different data states that they face while managing their customers but was focussed on the new features that assumed high quality data that will be input. While the opportunity to showcase some of the new features was well received by the customer we lost the opportunity to understand the real gap in data in real life which many of the other “advisors” only reported post go live. The focus of those sessions were to “pass” the tests rather than get failed by them, exposing the defects.
It is always tricky to show an incomplete system / solution to any customer — internal or external, but the project manager has to step up to ensure transparency and demonstrate ability to take the feedback for the betterment of the project. No bad news gets better with age. The early identification and accurate asssement are more valuable than “brand management” exercise, which most of the customer engagement end up as . There are many subtle aspects of customer engagement, but the clarity of purpose, the role of the customer being clear to them, adequate qualification of the customer, the use cases and leadership buy-in to this strategy are cornerstone of customer engagement.
With this we will move to focus on the major stakeholder group — The Project. Every aspect of the project by any group can be offset but not if it is the delivery team that needs to be focussed. Also do you consider the project manager part of your “delivery team”? Do let me know…
