Customer-Facing Ground Rules

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.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

A good friend of mine runs a professional services division for a software development company. His resources are responsible for working with the client from the point that the contract is signed through the acceptance of all of the deliverables. Whenever new people join his team, he always gives them the same speech--I’m paraphrasing, but it is along the lines of “You are the face of this organization, don’t let us down.” (It’s longer than that, but you get the point.)

I was having lunch with him recently and he was complaining that a number of people in his team seemed to be failing to live up to that expectation as there had been a few recent complaints. We chatted it through and he felt that the issue was that the company was growing and the professional services team was handling more projects. While they were adding staff to the team, they couldn’t grow as quickly as they wanted to--and new project managers were having to pair up with more experienced PMs until they learned the ropes.

I thought that there might be more to it than simply that, and asked whether anyone had ever defined what “don’t let us down” actually meant. They hadn’t, and that’s what I want to address in this organization.

Clear priorities
I asked my friend what was more important to him: hitting the profit target or …

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