The Customer Comes First

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.

  Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Whether internal or external, the customer is going to be the single most important stakeholder on your project, so it is imperative that you establish a set of guidelines for working with them based on variables that include their seniority, technical understanding, and level of engagement.

Customers — can’t live with them, can’t survive without them. Whether internal or external, the customer is the single most important stakeholder on your project. The sponsor may initially authorize the project, but without the customer, it won’t happen or succeed.

Life would be a lot easier if all customers were the same, but in reality there are many different types of customer that we are likely to run across. What type of customer do you have? Rather than detail every single type, which would take the rest of this article and several more, let’s look at the major variables that we are dealing with:

> Seniority.  Is your customer contact at an appropriate level of the organization? They need to be at a senior enough level to ensure that decisions are made in a timely manner without being so senior that they aren’t able to provide meaningful levels of detail. If your customer contact is too junior then you will likely find that it takes too long for approvals and decisions as they have to run everything up the chain of command; if …

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