Do You Really Know Your Customer?
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.
When we think about understanding of business environments, we tend to think about the sponsor, the internal customer, or similar roles. Internal projects tend to go a little bit deeper than that with engagement by user representatives—especially, but not exclusively, in agile environments (more on that in a bit).
But for external projects, there doesn’t tend to be a lot of direct connection with customers. The notable exception is for professional services projects where the work involves the implementation of a tool, platform or similar complex business solution.
I believe that is a lost opportunity. I think that it would be a lot easier for project managers and teams to be able to relate to the customer if they could actually put a face to that customer—if they seemed more real. That’s harder for consumer products than it is for business products because of the sheer volume of customers involved, but proxies like focus groups still provide an opportunity to get to know a sample customer.
Agile practitioners may argue that they know their customers because of the engagement of those end users in providing feedback and helping to iterate the solution. That’s true to an extent, although it applies more to internal users than external ones.
Additionally, in many cases those users are engaged outside of their normal working environments; …
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