Are We All Pulling in the Same Direction? Defining the Customer's Needs and Expectations

The fastest and strongest dogsled team cannot win the race without knowing the direction to the finish line. Similarly, a project cannot succeed unless the project leader and every member of the project team understand what it will take to meet the customer's needs and expectations. You cannot develop a project scope of work, schedule, and budget that meets your customer's needs and expectations if you don't understand these needs and expectations. As obvious as this seems, we have seen many projects run into difficulty because the project team's scope of work does not truly align with the customer's needs and expectations. Remember the story of the Edsel in Chapter Two? The scope of work for Ford's top team of engineers called for them to produce a car that was an advanced mechanical engineering product—which they did; but the Edsel was a failure because the customers did not buy the car. Beta-format video recorders had a similar fate. Sony's engineers met their scope of work that focused on producing a Beta format that produced superior recording quality. However, the manufacturers of VHS-format video recorders were the first to offer twohour recording times, enough to record most movies, while Beta tapes were, at that time, limited to one hour. The VHS manufacturers understood that the customers were more concerned about the length of recording time than what they judged to be relatively small differences in picture quality. VHS won the approval of the customer and the Beta format faded from the consumer market. To understand the customer's needs and expectations, Content, Procedural, and Relationship issues all must be understood, not just the Content issues on which many project managers want to focus.