Final Steps Addressing Customers

Once the project deliverables have been provided, one might think that the project is over. However, several things still have to be done.

Before you proceed, please read chapter 7 of the textbook (Wysocki 2009).

Maybe it is obvious, but, at the end of a project the project, partners are tired and want to finish a project. But it is a core interest of the project requester that project deliverables are properly implemented at the customer level. So make sure that everything is working, especially if you have provided a piece of software. You want a content customer, so even if you are not paid for it: answer the customer’s question “How does this and that work – I have problems with using this and that”, and if necessary, visit your customer to help him/her.

An essential part of each software implementation is a VERY detailed and complete documentation (or manual) about how the software works.

Project contracts are legal documents, and they deal with money. In case of problems and disputes, detailed and complete project documentation is essential in order to avoid going to court – or to strengthen your position, if you are going to court.

An important legal step is the formal acceptance of the customer. In typical contracts, there is a deadline until which the customer can make claims, so the formal acceptance proceeds automatically (if everything is ok). In other cases, it might be that there is a contracted procedure about formal acceptance.

Customer Relationship Management

As a project manager, you are interested in satisfied clients – and in a follow-up project.

“Customer relationship management (CRM) covers methods and technologies used by companies to manage their relationships with clients.” (Wikipedia, 2006).

Before you proceed, please read Wikipedia (2011), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management

In this course, we cannot include an entire module about CRM. But I would like to emphasize the following issues:

1. Ceremonial acceptance

Project customers are also people – they like to chat and to have a party. A social event strengthens the personal contacts between the project partners, and, from the point of view of the project requester, an informal, ceremonial acceptance of the project deliverables in such a social event might help to avoid problems. The type of social event depends on the size and duration of the project and also on the involved people. It can be an invitation to lunch or dinner at the last project meeting or a special event apart from regular meetings.

2. Evaluation of customers’ satisfaction during a project

A major threat to each project is non-communication between project customers and project providers. Shortly after starting a project, there might be unspoken minor problems in the relationship between customers and providers, which might become big problems if nobody speaks about them and deals with them.

My personal recommendation is to provide a questionnaire to the customers after the starting phase, e.g., after 3 months of a two-year project. The customer will be pleased because the provider shows that he/she is cares about the opinion and needs of the customer. And the project manager will have valuable hints for what controlling actions to take regarding communication, workflows, and project deliverables.

It is a good idea to discuss the results of such a questionnaire with your customers at the next project meeting.

Before you proceed, please have a look at an exemplary questionnaire for the evaluation of customers’ satisfaction.

3. Evaluation of customers’ satisfaction after a project

The evaluation after the project has similar goals as those during the project:

• Improve relationship between customer and provider
• Identify weaknesses of your work in order to make it better in the next project.

A typical tool is again the provision of questionnaires, preferably combined with a personal discussion. However, developing proper questionnaires is a difficult business. There are some general rules for questionnaires, e.g.,

• Keep it short!
• Choose an uneven number of options for grading, e.g., 1-5!
• Have an “overall satisfaction” question at the end!
• Leave space for comments (free text)!
• You can influence the results (and falsify statistics) by your questions, e.g.: Choosing a grading from 1-5, the results will be quite different for the following options:
  • 1 = good, 5 = poor
  • 1 = very good, 5 = very poor.

AFTER the evaluation of the results, you will always see what you have done wrong.

Before you proceed, please have a look at the exemplary questionnaires for the evaluation of customers’ satisfaction:

1. Students’ cafeteria
2. ifgi project
3. Big software provider

Internal Evaluation

An internal evaluation after a big project is part of an essential company culture. The internal evaluation not only identifies weaknesses and improves work for future projects; it also creates an atmosphere of open discussions among team members and motivates the team members in their own work and in providing good ideas.

A recommended procedure for bigger projects:

• Provision of questionnaires to the team members
• Evaluation by the project manager
• Personal discussion about the evaluation results
• Final result: Documented list for actions to improve internal work.

By the way, not only customers like social events. As a project manager, you should organize some ceremony or social event at the end of a project: first, to say thank you to your team members; second, to strengthen the satisfaction, motivation, and corporate identity of your team.