As I had mentioned in my post on defining project success, one of the potential measures for project success is Customer Satisfaction. And one of the most powerful ways of achieving customer satisfaction is to manage their expectations - not only at the start, but throughout the entire project. In order to manage their expectations, it helps to do the following:
◊ Ask Questions!: The best way to understand what your customer is expecting is to ask questions. Lots of questions! Not only do you need to capture their explicit expeciations, but there will always be implicit expectations that a customer will forget to mention. It's up to you to ask enough leading questions to capture those expectations. To figure out what questions you should ask, you need to put yourself into the customer's shoes and think about what your expectations might be.
◊ Pushback!: Not every customer expectation is going to be reasonable. It's up to you to let them know what is achievable. That doesn't mean you should say no to what they want, it means that you should work with your customer to meet as much of their expectations as possible, and be honest with them about what is not.
◊ Set up a Feedback loop: Take as many opportunities as you can to ensure two-way communication with your customer that allows you and them to provide feedback to each other. For instance:
● Document: After you think you understand your customer's expectations, document them in your own words and provide them to your customer for review. When something changes, as it inevitably will, document that as well.
● Build a prototype: As I discussed in a previous post, prototypes are great for fleshing out requirements and making sure that you are on the same page with your customer.
● Provide interim releases: The great thing about Sprint based development is that at the end of each Sprint, the customer has a working system that they can use and explore, and most importantly provide feedback on. This feedback can be incorporated into the next Sprint. This cycle allows you to keep in synch with the evolving expectations of the client.
-- Lisbi Abraham
No comments:
Post a Comment