4 Tips for Pragmatic Customer Centricity

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Communications Management   Stakeholder Management  

Recently, Harvard Business Review published an article about what the next generation of project management will look like. The article highlighted 10 next-generation skills:

1. Organizational awareness
2. Data acumen
3. Cross-functional collaboration
4. Decision-making
5. Willingness to explore and adopt new technology
6. Financial acumen
7. Process and framework expertise (i.e., business process improvement, agile, organizational change management, risk)
8. Growth mindset
9. The ability to coach and motivate teams
10. Customer centricity

Now, these are all good skills for today’s project manager to focus on to be relevant tomorrow. The tenth item on the list, customer centricity, piqued my interest the most.

My consulting roots trained me to place customer satisfaction as paramount. By and large, I did a pretty good job of placing my customer’s interest at the forefront. If a customer wanted something done by a specific date, I tried to move heaven and earth to make it happen (including working my teams into the ground in the process). I hated saying “no” to my customer.

But each time I made a promise I couldn’t deliver, my credibility took a hit.

After several painful episodes, I became more gun-shy about saying “yes.” I over-compensated by saying no for fear of not being able to deliver. The customers I wanted to please were …

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