Customer-Centric Project Management

Elizabeth Harrin, Phil Peplow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351946605
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

There has been a sea-change in the focus of organizations - whether private or public - away from a traditional product- or service-centricity towards customer-centricity and projects are just as much a part of that change. Projects must deliver value; projects must involve stakeholders, and Elizabeth Harrin and Phil Peplow demonstrate convincingly that stakeholders are the ones who get to decide what 'value' actually means. Customer-Centric Project Management is a short guide explaining what customer-centricity means in terms of how you work and its importance for project performance; using tools and processes to guide customer-centric thinking will help you see the results of engagement and demonstrate how things can improve, even on difficult projects. The text provides a straightforward implementation guide to moving your own business to a customer-centric way of working, using a model called Exceed and provides some guidance for ensuring that customer-centricity is sustainable and supported in the organization. This is a practical, rigorous and well-researched text. It draws on established models and uses the example of project implementation in a healthcare environment to demonstrate the impact of this significant way of thinking about value. The authors can't guarantee that the Exceed process will radically improve project success rates, and no process can. Adopting a customer-centric mindset and using the Exceed process to measure and monitor customer satisfaction will, however, help you move towards working with happier, more engaged stakeholders.

Chapter 1
Introducing A Customer-Centric Process

A lot has been written about stakeholder management and the importance of communication (more on that later), but there are few practical models relating to how to engage people in projects. If you want to work in a customer-centric way, you need to arm yourself with tools to help you do so. Exceed is a practical model to use as the basis for stakeholder communications. It is a proven process designed to deliver services which consistently and continually deliver exceptional levels of customer satisfaction. In short, while customer-centric project management is a state of mind, Exceed is the practical manifestation that shows you how customer-centric you really are. It’s the process of defining how well a business, department or team is perceived by its customers.

Knowing how good customers think you are is not the same as being customer-centric. Only by acting on their feedback will you get to high levels of service and customer satisfaction. There are eight steps in the Exceed process which allow you to act on the output from the feedback that customers provide. Exceed, when implemented professionally, will also ensure that high levels of satisfaction are maintained throughout the life of a project.

Putting customers – and by that we mean internal colleagues or third-party partners who take a service from another department – at the heart of how we work is a worthy aim. Companies spend a lot of time on focus groups and surveying end customers – consumers who buy products – but not a lot of time looking at how departments within the company serve each other. There might be an annual staff satisfaction survey which is the opportunity to air views on how different teams work together, but this type of conversation is rarely routine. Once you realize that as a team you have internal customers too, making yourself easy to do business with is the next logical step. Customer centricity is a mindset, a way of working. it is, however, very hard to measure attitudes and behaviours in any unequivocal way.

Exceed was designed to provide an unequivocal way to answer the key question that keeps senior executives in PMOs and other delivery teams awake at night: how good is my organization? To answer that, you need clarity of customer perception, a focus on customer engagement and the deliverables that matter to project customers. The process is based on uncovering the top issues and asking customers to score project teams against a number of variables. This allows committed businesses or functions to move beyond the rhetoric and to demonstrate unequivocally how good their service or project performance really is on a day-to-day basis.

The Origins of Exceed

The customer-centric process was developed to establish the basis of real agreement about the value being provided to stakeholders, and to develop closer engagement with customers using language that everyone could relate to. A global financial services company successfully implemented a customer-centric approach in its IT department. The IT service delivery function was already highly efficient, having demonstrated continual successes through a number of initiatives. Rationalization, in-sourcing and outsourcing had delivered operational savings of over £1m for three consecutive years. A further project to implement a technical support centre with a 50-strong team in india within nine months of board approval reduced annual spend by a further £1.8m. This project was completed without disruption to service, on time and to budget and proved the ability of IT to successfully deliver complex technical and sensitive projects in a very short timescale.

Shortly after this latest success, the chief information officer found himself in a frustrating position. The head of the company’s retail division had rung him to complain that the software updates his team desperately needed had not been implemented as promised.

The CIO’s department had a record of regular cost reduction and project delivery. That very week, the retail division had benefited from a further £250,000 cost reduction, delivered directly to this manager’s bottom line as a result of a telecoms contract renegotiation carried out by IT. However, without the software updates, retail branches could not satisfy their customers. The financial results may have been good, but they did nothing to improve customer service or the perception of IT within the retail division.

There are a number of morals to this story. Delivery organizations – and project teams are delivery organizations – need to clearly understand how to fully satisfy all of their customers’ needs at all times and in every situation. There also needs to be an agreed and credible process which proves the quality of the level of service being provided. In this case the IT team was doing a good job. Or were they? Who thought so? In fact, what really defines success for an organization, project or service and how do we measure and quantify it? After all, customers and stakeholders come in all shapes and sizes. They are not only demanding – their requirements are diverse and not always feasible or realistic.

Customer-centric thinking cuts through the confusion by answering a number of key questions:

• How professional is my operation?
• How good are we at delivering services or projects?
• What does good look like for us?

These are the questions that need answering if you are going to truly be customer-centric. Exceed is the process we use to get there.

it begins with a vision: ‘Every customer of company/department/project team XYZ will continually rate the services we provide as Good, Very Good or Excellent.’

That’s one sentence. The economy of language is deliberate: every word is important in articulating the essence of good customer service. Let’s look at those words again:

• Every customer of: all customers of company/department/project team XYZ must be represented through a collaborative partnership with the project team.
• will continually rate: regular and continual customer dialogue is key to being customer-centric.
• the services we provide: there must be a clear focus on the deliverables from company/department/project team XYZ.
• as Good, Very Good or Excellent: customers measure the perceived value they receive in a simple, deliberately subjective way. This is the heart of being customer-centric. It is what the customer thinks is important that counts.

If you haven’t worked it out yet, the single overriding principle behind the Exceed process is customer satisfaction. We believe that this is the only credible and worthwhile measure of an organization’s success. Customer-centric project management puts customer satisfaction at the heart of project management with the aim of ensuring all project customers believe the project team is delivering a quality service. Exceed shows whether you are achieving that or not.

This is a shift from standard quality measurements which are usually internal and ‘rear view’ in nature. In a PMO, earned value management metrics, number of submitted scope changes, cumulative project slip, effort overruns, overtime worked and quality control statistics (all diagnostic project metrics discussed in Kendrick 2012) are hardly likely to energize customers. These metrics tend to relate almost entirely to issues which had a negative effect on their lives and are almost always yesterday’s news.

Measurement of service quality in both project and operational environments is often limited to the performance of processes that the customer has a right to expect as standard. No project sponsor begins the project expecting that the measures of time, cost and quality will be ignored (the classic triple constraint of project management) or that tolerance levels will be exceeded. There is the understanding that change could create a situation where time, cost and quality would need to be revisited, but by hiring a competent project manager there is the expectation that these measures will be achieved. This is the hygiene factor for projects; the basic levels of service that project customers expect as standard from their project teams. We should not expect to get credit for what our internal customers take for granted.¹ Failing to fully engage with project customers means that what they actually consider important can be overlooked while we pat ourselves on the back for doing what they hired us for in the first place.

Even with a fledgling appreciation of the role of customer satisfaction in project management, project teams can struggle to convince their customers of the wonderful service they receive. They rarely, if ever, gather metrics to justify the value of project management (Thomas and Mullaly 2008). Part of the reason for this is that projects are a journey and our existing metrics are not. Time, cost and quality measures do not adequately reflect the nature of the experience along the way. You can travel 10 miles in a Rolls Royce Corniche or walk along the roadside barefoot and reach your destination in an acceptable time but the experience of both journeys is quite different. Customer-centric approaches like Exceed provide an opportunity to work collaboratively with customers to elicit success criteria, define new metrics and track them in a meaningful way throughout the entire project journey.

Remember our fed-up CIO from the beginning of this chapter? The Exceed process in his department began with the simple vision that we saw earlier: ‘Every customer of IT service delivery will continually rate the services we provide as Good, Very Good or Excellent’. Experienced (or dare we say cynical?) managers would be forgiven for thinking that this vision could never be achieved. However, the team achieved rapid results from the first few weeks and they fully achieved this vision in less than six months.

There wasn’t anything special about this particular CIO or his organization. It was just about putting the customer front and centre and working in a customer-centric way. As a process, Exceed has worked in a number of companies and industries. The Exceed process was initially created for use in IT but has been used successfully within financial services, logistics and healthcare businesses. The case study starting in Chapter 5 discusses the implementation of Exceed in another company in a different industry. Before we get there, though, let’s take a step back and look at why what customers think is increasingly important in today’s business environment.

Key Points:

1. Customers are people who receive a service from another department or third-party partner. They are customers of the project management process.
2. Customer-centric project management puts customer satisfaction at the heart of project management with the aim of ensuring all project customers believe the project team is delivering a quality service.
3. Exceed is a proven process which shows whether you are achieving that or not. it’s designed to help teams deliver services which consistently and continually deliver exceptional levels of customer satisfaction.
4. Exceed is expressed as a vision: ‘Every customer of this department will continually rate the services we provide as Good, Very Good or Excellent.’
5. Exceed provides an opportunity to work collaboratively with customers to elicit success criteria and track them in a meaningful way throughout the entire project journey.

Notes

¹ One of the senior executives we have worked with – who shall remain nameless -summed this up by saying, ‘No one applauds when you flush the toilet.’ In other words, there are some things that people simply expect to work and that you should never expect to get any credit for.

Chapter 2
Why Customers Count

‘Projects are investments undertaken to create value (economic or social in nonprofit environments) for the project’s stakeholders,’ write Thomas G. Lechler and John C. Byrne in their book, The Mindset for Creating Project Value (2010). If we take this as the reason why projects are done in the first place, generating value from project activity is essential.

Project management methods do not guarantee value. They guarantee (or go some way to offering a guarantee, if you want to hedge your bets) that projects will deliver according to the agreed corporate standards and within defined tolerances. In fact, implementing project management processes does not guarantee a return on investment from those processes, and research shows that even where tangible benefits from a project management implementation are being delivered, they are not quantified (Thomas and Mullaly 2008).

So while on the one hand we use project management processes that don’t guarantee value, on the other we are still measuring value through the triple constraint. ‘The goal of getting “projects done right” is to have projects come in on time, on budget, and meeting all quality standards,’ write Weinstein and Jaques (2009: 354) – and that is their prediction for how things will be in 2025. There is something missing from this definition of ‘done right’: the people who receive the output of the project and who want to do something useful with it.

As any project manager will know, projects do not exist in a vacuum. They are created from the need to fulfil an organizational objective such as generating more revenue or improving brand awareness. Projects happen because someone – an individual or a committee – deems that this particular initiative will deliver some kind of business benefit. Typically, the person who stands to gain the most value from a project becomes the project sponsor. For example, the sales director would sponsor a project to install new customer management software, providing the sales team with more opportunities to cross-sell to the existing customer base. The sponsor receives the output from the project and wants to do something with it to achieve those organizational objectives.

Creating a successful project team involves ensuring excellent links between the ‘permanent’ project employees – those who work predominantly in a projectized way such as project managers and business analysts – and those who have joined a project team on a secondment basis as a subject matter expert or stakeholder. Project teams are made up of wide groups of diverse professionals, and ensuring that stakeholders are engaged in the project process is essential to the success of the project. Close working relationships with the project customer are important.

Project management and business change have been two sides of the same coin for some time. Project management delivers a specific product, and business change ensures that this product is effectively used and embedded in the organization. However, the lines between these two disciplines are – and should be – blurring.

Today it is no longer adequate for project management teams to work in isolation on their projects, focusing solely on delivering a product and ignoring the context in which it is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Authors
• Praise for Exceed and Customer-Centric Project Management
• 101 Introduction
• 1 Introducing A Customer-Centric Process
• 2 Why Customers Count
• 3 Why Collaborative Project Management is not Enough
• 4 Measuring Project Performance
• 5 Customer Centricity in Practice: A Case Study
• 6 Customer Centricity In A Project Environment
• 7 Refining Your Custqmer-Centric Approach
• 8 Implementing Exceed
• 9 Moving Forward With Customer-Centric Project Management
• Carry on the Discussion
• Appendix 1: Exceed Issues List from Spire Healthcare’s Initial Implementation
• Appendix 2: Generic Project Exceed Survey Template
• Appendix 3: Tailored Project Exceed Survey Template
• Appendix 4: Sample Job Description Text
• References
• Licensing
• Index
• Advances in Project Management