Project e-Tip of the Week
October 29th, 2003 by Hal
This Project e-Tip comes to us courtesy of Claude Emond. You might recognize the name. Claude has been one of the most prodigious commenters of my postings, although he's been somewhat absent for the last few months. Claude makes a great point about client involvement. I urge you to heed his advice. Make it your habit of engaging with your client on a regular basis and in different forums and settings. Project success depends on it.
 The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week |
| 016: Keep the Customer/End-User Involved |
|
The Standish Group, in its 1999 Chaos Report, identifies user involvement as No. 1 in its Top Ten List of project key success factors. Yet many project managers shy away from this obvious tip, or, at the most, meet the customer at the start of the project to define requirements and will not 'converse' with him/her again until much later in the project, only to find a very uninformed, unpleased, and distressed party (and much to do to regain his/her trust). User involvement must be more than that. Successful project managers have realized long ago that, in this changing world of us, customers/users also change their mind along the way and must also understand that conditions in the project environment change for all sort of uncontrollable reasons. Both the project manager and his/her customer minds must be 'in sync', preferably in a continuous manner, in order for the former to satisfy the latter. Thus, get and keep your customer involved in your project as much as humanly possible and you will automatically get, time after time, high quality deliverables (and a highly satisfied customer) while keeping the risks of not meeting requirements as low as possible. Continuous end-user involvement: the obvious road still less traveled!
Project e-Tip provided by reader Claude Emond. If you want a graphical illustration of how this might work, Claude suggests you ponder over the two figures presented at www.qualiscope.ca/familiar_vs_new_way.pdf |
©2003 Hal Macomber | RPM | e-Tip Archive | PDF | Submit Tip |
One of the two autographed copies of The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work is now on its way to Montreal. One more left (unless David Schmaltz donates more). Send me your best advice.
Related Posts
- Project e-Tip of the Week People frequently ask me for advice on adopting a lean approach on their projects. I write them, either by email or in ...
- Weekly Project e-Tip: Speak about Customer Value with Your Team Context provides teams with a sensibility for action. There's no better context on a project than what is of value to t...
- Shift Good Intentions into Commitments Inspiration for this week's Project e-Tip came from Jeffrey Cufaude's May 19th weblog posting Are Good Intentions Good E...
- Project e-Tip of the Week Today's Project e-Tip comes from Glen Alleman. Glen is quite a good thinker and writer taking on tough subjects and mak...
- Project e-Tip: Trust the Terrain This e-Tip encourages us to not get too attached to our plans. Have a read... The Project Reformer...
