2 ways to get to know your Customer

Can you describe one day of your Customer's life? What are his gains? His pains?

If your vision converges with your Customer's reality, you will be able to deliver Customer Value. But reality looks like this:

You may have experienced once an unexpected change in the scope of a project, or a Customer predisposed against you. Your vision did not converge to your Customer's reality.

Our decisions will be easier to make if they are guided by the needs of our Customer. And you will know about his reality and needs with these approaches:

Before you meet your Customer, look at him through Dan Roam's Vivid Lens: four lenses that reflect for attributes of your customer, to prepare in advance a more effective interview, and to help you to anticipate his reaction.

The four Lenses are:

 

L for Leadership opposing Doer. 
     The Leader sets the vision. The Doer makes it happen.

E for Expertise opposing Newbie.  
     The Expert has little tolerance to simplicity. The Newbie to complexity.

N for Numeracy opposing Emotional.  
      Is your Customer moved by numbers or emotions?

S for Sympathy opposing Antagonist.  
     Be prepared for love or war. For the latter, show that your Customer's concerns are taken into account up front.

Vivid LENS help us to understand who we are approaching to, and what they are really willing to look and listen to.

After your first meeting, complete an Empathy Map by answering the following six questions:

1. What does he see ?
2. What does he hear ? 
3. What does he really think and feel ? 
4. What does he say and do ? 
5. What is his biggest pain ? 
6. What does he really want or need to achieve (main gain) ?

This tool will help us to develop a better understanding of his environment, behaviour, concerns and aspirations.

Making and maintaining a Customer Profile will help us to:

• Communicate a targeted message, a message that is valuable to your Customer.

• Pay attention to key words that will advance priorities, critical paths, issues that are prone to uncertainty or conflict.

• Build trust. Upon trust, today's Customer will be tomorrow's ally in future projects.

The benefit is huge. Investing in knowing your customer is time worth to be spent. 

A shortcut to Customer Value

You may have experienced a situation where you let your customer know about some issues prior to deliver an expected milestone.

You brought it at the last minute. And your customer was not happy to hear about it.

A shortcut to provide Customer Value? Create the environment to diminish DOUBT

Project Management Core Skills for Customer Value

The "toolbox" you have built on your honed skills is helping you to struggle with objectives, tasks, priorities, target dates….. What are those skills to help you thrive in Project Management and deliver Customer Value?

This is an adapted list from Josh Kaufmann, in my opinion, also aplicable to Project Management:

1. Information-Assimilation to recognize the key Information.
2. Communication to make your message understood by a targeted audience, both in written and verbal form.
3. Mathematics to feel comfortable with numbers. To analyze and show budget status, forecasts, results, trends, among others.
4. Decision-Making. How to identify critical issues, crítical paths, and handle ambiguity.
5. Rapport. How to interact with other people in a way that encourages them to like, trust, and respect you. 
6. Conflict-Resolution to anticipate potential sources of conflict and resolve disagreements when they occur. 
7. Scenario-Generation. How to create, evaluate, and communicate a possible future scenario.
8. Planning. How to identify the necessary next steps to achieve an objective, account for dependencies and use of contingencies. 
9. Self-Awareness to manage effectively your limited energy, willpower, and focus. 
10. Interrelation to recognize, understand, and make use of key features of systems and relationships within them. Systems thinking. 
11. Skill Acquisition to find and use available resources to learn. Forever.

Although Communication may seem underrated in relation to other skills, from the customers' point of view, it is the key to generate a real impact and built trust. Customers may expect to know the project goes on track. To foresee the forthcoming phases. To be confident about achieving the objectives on due time and form.

A customer's opinion about your good performance may be eroded due to poor communication.

And from your point of view, what are your key core skills? Should you develop any?

Today is the right moment to assess your core skills and design your personal self-training plan for the following weeks.

The three perspectives of Project Management

From Scott Berkun's book "Making Things Happen" about the business, technology and customer perspective in project management:

"It might be possible to satisfy some of the top issues or goals from each of the three perspectives by defining a project targeted at where the three perspectives overlap"

The purpose:  Customer Value.