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Words to Make You Scream
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
Every project manager has likely heard a variation on the refrain at some point in their careers, and in my case I have heard it way more often than I care to remember. You proudly present the solution to the client for the first time since sign-off and wait for the smile to come over their face--and their exclamation of sheer delight as they realize that the solution is better than they ever imagined it could be. What you get instead is a furrowed brow, a look of consternation and those five words that stop your heart: “That’s not what I want.”
So how did this come about? You’ve built the solution to meet all of the requirements (that the customer signed off), and it’s been built in accordance with the design (that the customer reviewed and approved). In this article, I’m going to spend some time exploring how this situation can come about and what we as project managers can do to try and prevent it.
The First Problem with Clients: Expectations
As project managers, we are told from the start of our careers that it is important to manage stakeholder expectations--to prevent them from making too many assumptions, to be as clear as possible with them about what is and isn’t possible. This is perfectly true, but there is another expectation that often gets overlooked--the customer has an expectation of what the solution is going to look…
As project managers, we are told from the start of our careers that it is important to manage stakeholder expectations--to prevent them from making too many assumptions, to be as clear as possible with them about what is and isn’t possible. This is perfectly true, but there is another expectation that often gets overlooked--the customer has an expectation of what the solution is going to look…
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world." - Albert Einstein |