Journyx PM Journal

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Mon, 10 Oct 2005

The IT project was a success. It was on time and on budget, and it did what it was supposed to. The only problem: The customer wasn't happy. The project manager had provided written weekly status reports, just as the customer had requested, but he had missed the crucial second step: asking for feedback. The project manager learned too late that you can never assume you know what a customer is thinking -- you have to ask. Because he failed to do that, the customer was resentful, says Naomi Karten, a principal at Randolph, Mass.-based training and consulting firm Karten Associates. "The information [the customer] was given didn't mesh with what he was looking for, [but] he didn't take any steps to ask for what he really wanted," she observes.

Welcome to a world where even successful IT projects can be deemed failures if the customer expected something other than what IT delivered. To survive and prosper, you have to learn how to manage what customers expect.

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