Attack of the Invisible Customers!

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

Most project managers, when pressed, would say that being able to run the project with no customer involvement is a dream assignment. I’m an independent consultant--a project manager who is used to having quite a bit of job autonomy and control of the engagements I manage. So if I have the chance to lead everything on the project without micromanagement from the customer, that sounds great…on the surface.

Here’s the concern: You still have to meet someone’s expectations to get a successful implementation. You still have to satisfy requirements. You still have to deliver a product to the customer’s end users that they can use. Even if the customer chooses not to participate, if you deliver an unusable end solution, then you’ve still failed, period.

If you’re the project manager and you find yourself in a nightmare situation where your customer is (for whatever reason) out of the picture, what do you do? How can you succeed? Is it even possible?

There are the extreme situations that I can envision where the customer just stops answering the phone…literally. What I’m really referring to here is the more realistic scenario where you may have some minimal contact and they’re probably paying their bills for milestones and deliverables (otherwise you have a different problem), but they’re not attending …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.