It's For Your Customer – Not You!
I read a great blog recently about compelling events and it got me thinking about the way that many of us in business project manage our customer deliveries.
The context of the compelling events article was essentially that each event had a defined date and were as a result of a particular business event. The one piece of the post that provoked my thoughts was the element discussing the need to understand the customers compelling event i.e. why is the customer doing this project in the first place?
To all of our businesses customer is king, but we often lose sight of this fact during our normal working day. This is particularly the case where the purchase is not instant i.e. it usually involves multiple interactions e.g. a piece of consultancy.
As time progresses, what tends to happen is that we become so inwardly focused that we forget that we are engaged with the customer at their request i.e. the project often turns into being “our own” and not for the customer who asked for it in the first place. We spend time on our management reports, making sure our stats look good, chasing up internal “stuff”… the list goes on and on. All vital, but these are activities should come after ensuring a continued customer engagement.
So how do we stop this happening?
There are a few simple steps that we can take.
- At the outset of the project, make sure you understand the customers end-game. This may seem an obvious statement, but can we all put our hands on heart 100% of the time and say we took the time to really get where the customer was going?
- Revisit 1 above throughout the duration of the project. Engage with the customer, has anything changed? If it has, are the needs still being met? Does anything in the deliverable need to change?
- If things start going wrong, don’t become inward looking e.g. you’ve run over-budget. If this is your fault, then it’s your problem, not the customers. They should still get the same attention they always have and should not feel like they are being forgotten.
- Talk to your customers regularly. This is essence of effective project management. Tell them what’s going well. Tell them what’s not – they can often help out or at least be willing to understand your view point.
- Encourage your customers be open with you. If they can’t/won’t, no matter, you have to be open with them and continue to seek an understanding of their drivers.
Does your business consistently seek to understand your customers needs when delivering a project? What advice can you share.
Photo : TonyVC on Flickr – with thanks!
Tags: business management, customer feedback, customer relationship management, Project Management, Project manager
