PM War Stories - Communications Confusion over words
From the PMI Global Insights Blog
by Cameron McGaughy,
James Turchick
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Date
I wanted to share a recent event that is in line with our communication war stories topic. Over the last couple of days, my team has been trying to work a project and secure some critical data that is hard to get. Our different teams were tripping over each other trying to understand what we were doing.
Here is our situation: My company qualifies customers for services on estimated guesses. After the customer is installed and using the services, my company now gets real data and knows how well a customer can use a service and what additional services and speeds for which a customer can qualify. What we needed was the original qualification (the promise given to the customer), not what the actual data after the install says. We were using words like original loop qual, loop qual at point of sale, service promise, estimated loop qual, and calculated qualification.
Impact: This part of the project was in confusion and getting no where. Subsequent analysis dependent upon this data downstream could not proceed. This data was on the critical path. If the wrong data is pulled, we come up with the wrong conclusions or have to restart the data pull. Then, the project gets delayed or is implemented poorly.
Next steps and results: We had to get everyone on the phone and clear up the confusion immediately. Next, we had to clearly define what the actual ask is for that data. Last, we memorialized that definition so that there was no more confusion. Sounded like a lot of work, but it was absolutely necessary.
Did we do it right? Was there something else we should have done?
Posted
by
Marcos Arias
on: October 23, 2014 02:55 PM |
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Comments (5)
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Bruce Harpham
Editor & Author| ProjectManagementHacks.com
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Is there a sales stakeholder involved in the project? It sounds like that group would be best placed to comment on the Statement of Work/promise to the customer.
Naomi Caietti
Senior Project Manager | ePMO | Higher Education | Healthcare & IT| Linkedin.com/In/NaomiCaietti
Where was your business analyst?
Marcos Arias
Managing Partner| CX MD
Dunwoody, Ga, United States
Bruce, in regard to sales, they would be interested in the output of this analysis for sure. With that said, they would be least able to identify the actual data fields we needed. The data resides in the back end systems that ultimately feed into their sales systems. I hope that makes sense.
Marcos Arias
Managing Partner| CX MD
Dunwoody, Ga, United States
Naomi,
Great Question! We did not have a business analyst because we were trying to make sure we knew what we were requesting first. We needed alignment on that before we could then go off and seek the actual data that a business analyst could obtain. Different systems have different business analysts that are familiar with them. Not efficient, but it is our reality.
Suhail Iqbal
Suhail Iqbal PMIATP CIPM FAAPM MPM MQM CLC CPRM SCT AEC SDC SMC SPOC PRINCE2 MCT| PM Training School
Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan
The steps you had gone through in clarifying the goals and removing all confusion were necessary and you did a job well done.
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