12
Market and Customer Knowledge
When you enchant people, your goal is not to make money from them or to get them to do what you want, but to fill them with great delight.
—GUY KAWASAKI, FORMER CHIEF EVANGELIST, APPLE
Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories that you tell.
—SETH GODIN, AUTHOR OF TRIBES
Success in the marketplace is the usual source of positive cash flow. Successful projects bring vitality into an organization. As key contributors to these outcomes, project managers are well advised to be aware of what is happening in the market and make appropriate decisions that positively influence the cash flow resulting from project outcomes. Although new product development projects are clearly linked to the market, most project outcomes end up in the market in one form or another. In the case of internal projects, the customer may be another department or division in the same organization. The end user—the person who ultimately benefits from the project outcome—will be the customer of the project. When we talk about customer projects, the immediate customer is the client, and the final end user is the customer of that client. In a sense, then, the results of all projects end up competing in a marketplace.
What we must never forget is that customers pay the bills and our salaries. Bosses, of course, are important to our well-being and future, but if customers go away or stop doing business with us, everybody suffers. Some people say there is only one true customer: the final purchaser of the outcome who pays real money for the product or service. We say there are also internal customers who depend on project outputs and outcomes. Complete project managers have an obligation to attend to all customers.
Project managers, as servant leaders, need a good knowledge of the customer and of the market for project outcomes if they are to be truly successful. Understanding competitive forces in the market is a key aspect of this knowledge. This chapter focuses on marketing and customer issues most important to the complete project manager: determining who potential customers are and what they want; learning who the competitors are and what they are offering; understanding the trade-offs among product performance attributes of benefits, features, and price; and determining ideal timing for market introduction. We also share a case study about organizational ethics and its important role in the interface between executives, employees, competitors, and clients.
Project Outcomes
Generally speaking, customers need project outcomes that solve a problem or issue, launch a product, or upgrade a system. A first step to generating revenue is to design products, services, or processes that help customers solve their problems and meet or exceed customers’ expectations. Customer demand is also influenced by total market demand, and a company’s share of that market is influenced by both the project outcome and project duration.
Sometimes a customer’s need is to remain competitive or keep up with what others are doing. I (Bucero) remember being assigned to create a PMO (project management office) in a multinational organization. I asked my project sponsor, “Why do we need to create a PMO?” He said, “Because it is in fashion; every organization who manages projects has one.” I could not believe that, but my manager’s opinion was influenced by the competition in those times. Because the competition was doing it, he thought we should do it.
Many times, but not always, the faster a project is completed, the better position a company is in to capture market share. Customers provide great clues about how to get their business. Are you asking questions of your customers about their needs, the trends that affect them, and their wishes? An answer you will often receive, as well as our suggestion for how to proceed, is “Please do it”—that is, fulfill the customer’s need—“as soon as you can.”
When markets suffer a downturn, an effective strategy is to increase new product or service development, instead of cutting back. That way the company is better positioned to do well when the market picks up again and gains competitive advantage.
Asking customers about what they want and need and the forces that affect them is crucial to serving them better. How do you ask good and professional questions? It is not easy, as it requires time and practice, but integrating these questions and skills is achievable. We discuss how to ask good questions in this chapter.
Market Trends
Knowing market trends is important, and it takes time and observation to become familiar with them. You can get numerical figures from the Internet or from specialized magazines, but for a real understanding, you need to observe customer habitudes and uses. One best practice I (Bucero) use is to ask what services my customers desire when I am running a seminar, project, or consulting satisfaction survey. Customers need to be loved; they appreciate that. They also are fond of sharing how they use your product, so give them that opportunity.
Keep in mind that sometimes what is good for one industry is not good for another industry. Even a superstar project manager cannot be knowledgeable about all industries. So the first best practice regarding market trends is to focus on a particular industry. Project managers often have a clouded understanding of marketing, equating it with sales. Marketing is a set of procedures that serve to help the project manager know the market better. The market consists of those customers that may buy the final product, the end users who will use it, the problems these people are trying to solve, and the competitors who are offering solutions to the same problems for the same customers and end users. Marketing includes conducting competitive analysis, determining product requirements, and launching new products.
The project manager’s emphasis is usually on producing the final product, not selling it, and his reward is based on that production work too. I (Bucero) defended that idea over a number of years until I realized that I spent most of my time on the customer site dealing with customer project problems. I knew my customer’s needs very well. That meant that I was the right person to convince the customer to buy more solutions from my organization. I needed to stop thinking that marketing and selling the project outcome was someone else’s problem. I was in the best position to make the sale happen.
Product design often comes from internal assumptions about what will sell. A typical assumption is “If we build it, they will buy it.” This assumption has often proved false, however. For example, I (Bucero) presented an e-learning program proposal to one of my customers. That program was part of a huge training program proposal for project management and executive training for that organization. I explained to the customer that my e-learning product was being developed and it would not be ready until six months later. The customer accepted that, my company invested a lot of money to develop, test, and produce the product … and in the end, the customer did not want it.
When our assumptions prove faulty on many projects, then more thought needs to be given to marketing. One solution is to put a marketing person on the core team. This serves to increase the team’s knowledge and understanding of customer and market issues. Some companies even put a customer on core teams.
MARKETING RESPONSIBILITIES
Although a complete project manager needs a greater understanding of marketing, this does not mean that the project manager takes over all marketing functions connected with the project outcome. Rather, the project manager becomes involved in those marketing functions identified earlier as important to project managers: identifying what the customer or end user really wants, understanding the competition, making trade-offs between features and price or cost, and determining the timing of project completion (project introduction). The project manager needs to understand these functions because the project team needs to make decisions in these areas during the project life cycle, and the decisions will affect the success of the project outcome.
We believe marketing is necessary for all types of projects. The need for it may be most obvious in new product development projects. However, for client engagement or internal IT development projects too, marketing knowledge helps ensure that the final product meets the needs of end users. I (Bucero) have been involved in methodology implementation projects in organizations worldwide. A common situation I encountered was this: The customer hires a consultant and asks her to develop a customized project methodology for the organization. The customer allows the consultant to interview managers, upper managers, customers, and other stakeholders, but does not allow project managers themselves to be asked about their real needs, mainly because they are busy managing projects. Project managers’ input is thus minimal and not very detailed. The project methodology is developed, but it is very hard to implement it because the end users did not participate in its design.
Project managers need to talk to end users, asking questions and validating responses. Continue the process during development through prototype demonstrations. These steps are crucial for project and organizational success.
PRODUCTS AND SERVICES OFFERED
The products and services offered in the project management field have been growing worldwide, especially over the last ten years. Project management consulting and training services are now offered in most countries. Many more universities offer project management certificate training, both in-person and online.
In central Europe, there are many project management consulting companies. Along the Mediterranean coast, we find more project management training companies. In some countries, there is a mix between PM consulting, outsourcing, and training services. More people are looking to become certified as project management professionals or seeking one of the increasing range of certifications sponsored by the Project Management Institute. Looking to the future, we predict the PM consulting business will continue growing. Many companies sense the need to reorganize around project, program, and portfolio management, managing more and more better projects.
Customer Orientation
One of our lessons learned is that information about customers and end users is very important if we are to define the right mix between price and features for project outcomes. Sometimes customers do not know what they want. And they often change their minds. So the complete project manager needs to be business oriented and needs to think how to help customers better understand their needs. Customers care most about how well their problem has been solved and not much, or not always, about the technology used to solve it.
People working on customer projects often think the customer is not very clever. Customers are not dumb; you are there to solve their problems. Complete project managers need to apply empathy when working with customers, trying to understand their needs and putting themselves into the customers’ shoes.
One of the best practices we recommend to gain empathy for customers is to visit them. I (Bucero) was involved as a project manager in the financial industry. I managed projects for banks and savings banks. I asked my organization to allow me to participate from time to time as a project reviewer. That way I could visit various customers within the industry, live within their environments for a while, and experience their daily problems and issues. After some years I came to know what the key points to understand were and how to deal with them much better. Likewise, I (Englund) worked in factory sales development for a number of years, supporting sales reps in the field. I made it a point to travel out to customer sites quite often. I observed how they used our products, listened to their questions and concerns, and made presentations that helped them better understand our products and the direction in which we were headed. Not only was I better able to assist in the sales process, but I also brought back valuable inputs to the marketing department about problems and opportunities.
WHO IS THE CUSTOMER?
The customer is the person or the organization that purchases a product’s or service’s outcome. In some cases, there is a group of customers who make buying decisions. Usually, the customer is the person (or people) who pays the bill for the outcome, though sometimes the purchasing department negotiates final prices with the provider.
For new product development projects, the customers are the people who buy the end product. For internal projects, the customer may be another department or division. For customer projects, the customer is the client who requests the engagement. Regardless of the type of project, the customers need to be satisfied by the project results.
Often the person who will use the final product is not the person who pays the bill. Those customers usually define their needs based on the needs of a group of people called end users—the people who use or benefit from the project outcome. These are the people who need to be satisfied with project outcomes. To know and to please the customer is important, but it is even more important to know and please the end user. Some project managers miss this important difference.
LISTENING
If we listen only to customers and solve their problems, we may not necessarily solve the problems of end users. It is crucial to understand what the customers and the end users want. Some consulting organizations offer solutions to customers without listening to real problems. A project manager from a multinational organization said,
I’m really sad, you know. I’m the project manager for a customer project in an insurance company in Spain. My company provides insurance software solutions, and my boss sold one of those solutions to the customer. I’m managing the implementation project now on the customer site. I found the end user does not need more than 30 percent of the functionality that the solution provides. The customer has paid a lot of money for that solution, and they will not use most of it. The end user was not involved in the solution evaluation, only department managers. I think it is not the best way to do business successfully. I’m frustrated because I know the real need from the end user, but it is too late.
TAP THE WISDOM OF CROWDS
The term “crowdsourcing” is coming into vogue. It is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services, including ideas and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly evolving group of Internet users. In the context of project, program, and portfolio management, it is a valuable technique in our toolkits to capture thoughts, ideas, and experiences that can improve any endeavor.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki explores the decision-making capabilities of groups. The book’s main thesis is that the collective wisdom of a group that is (1) diverse, (2) independent in thought, and (3) decentralized is much greater than the sum of its parts (Surowiecki 2004). Aggregating independent opinions or actions of a large group will yield a result that is more accurate or wiser than even that group’s smartest member could make on his or her own. This point applies even if the crowd is not particularly well-informed (not experts) about the subject at hand. Surowiecki argues that diversity, independence, and decentralization are even more valuable than intelligence or expertise. When these conditions are met, “the crowd is holding a nearly complete picture of the world in its collective brain” and is therefore best able to come up with the most appropriate solution (Surowiecki 2004, 11). (Note: A TV series is based on these same concepts, although focused more on crime solving.)
There are several areas where I (Englund) have incorporated aspects of James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds into my life and work. From his premise that “Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few—no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future,” a few conditions apply. To apply the technique in defining project success, I believe it is very important to collect as many diverse inputs as possible about what the project should be and what defines success. I may have my own view, but I’ve taken to asking others their views as well. It’s amazing how much richer the outcome is when divergent views are integrated. So I do one-on-one interviews with stakeholders at the beginning of each project.
I do a similar step in consulting engagements. I interview a cross-section of people using a questionnaire tailored to the presented challenge. I did this at an architectural/engineering firm that engaged me to help them create an environment for more successful projects. I believe solutions to most problems exist in the minds of the people working closest to them. It seems I may be the only person who ever asked them what their ideas are. I both listened and served as the aggregator of this distributed wisdom. Everyone then gathered together in a workshop to share findings and discuss ideas for action plans.
At times when I think of myself as the expert, I’ve learned so much more and gathered different but effective insights by asking for opinions from laypersons. A prime example is my wife. She may not know project management as well or the technical aspects of something I’m working on. When I’m stuck, however, I’ve learned to ask for her input. She may even be more knowledgeable than I am. Most often the solution appears within a few minutes into our discussion. At work, when the technical team has been left-brain dominant, I’ve called one or two colleagues and asked if they could bring their right brain over to join us. They offered marvelous insights that got us moving again.
In contrast, I also have experiences when the crowd dilutes the project. A key example is chairing professional conferences. Too many people expressing divergent ideas create an identity crisis. I believe there are occasions when the vision of the leader needs to dominate so that a clear and consistent theme prevails. Steve Jobs also made sure his vision drove product development at Apple, as the crowd may not have even anticipated or dreamed of what he saw.
CARE AND FEEDING OF CUSTOMER CONCERNS
We met Remco Meisner when he attended our project sponsorship seminar. Remco impressed us with his ability to share interesting stories about how to handle difficult situations. For example:
Pierre: How would you handle this customer of mine? He asks for a project manager with international experience, certified in PRINCE2 and ITIL, full command of Word and writing in English, German, French, and Dutch languages, holding a university degree, and also willing to travel all over the globe.
Remco: I’d jump at it!
Pierre: My thoughts exactly! The problem is, though, that he’s not willing to pay for any of it. He offers EUR90 an hour!
Remco: I’d tell him to sod it!
Pierre: Yeah. Perhaps you are right. It is so tempting, though. It is an interesting project and I would really like to take it on. But I suppose I shouldn’t.
Remco: I’ve been there, too. You know, if you really like the challenge, perhaps you should take it. There will be other opportunities, though. Don’t soil your own nest. I agree they can be a nuisance, our customers. I had one only yesterday, confronting me with failures in his own organization—as if I could do anything about that!
Pierre: What did you do?
Remco: I don’t ever disagree with customers. I merely offer them ways out of a spot. I think that’s the only thing we project managers can do—we offer organizations and customers a way out of a situation that doesn’t agree with them. Putting up a fight has no use. It would only broaden the gap between me and my client or create one that wasn’t there before.
Pierre: So that is the trick. Agree with your customer, take the full blame?
Remco: No. It’s not as simple as that. I just don’t fight back. It’s not about taking the full blame, though. There is a difference. I think people—and after all, even our customers are a kind of human being, aren’t they?—tend to have firm discussions with us as soon as they are in a tight spot. They are pushed to the limit by the situation, their superiors, their staff, or their wives for that matter. (Laughter.) Whatever that situation might be and whoever might have caused it to appear.
Pierre: So, they bite because they were bitten?
Remco: That’s it. There is no use in biting back. What good would that bring? Suppose the client retreats and agrees to your arguments. He would admit his error, lose his position, crumble. He won’t do that. Even in case he suddenly realizes he has made a mistake, there is no way he’ll take back his words.
Pierre: But how do we influence his train of thought, then? He wants something, realizes he is not going to get it, and he needs someone to blame but himself for it.
Remco: That’s a good summary! As you can see, he is nearly where he should be. He wants something which will not come to him. He has a train of thoughts around it. He needs a bad cop. There’s no benefit in fighting against mostly the right sequence. It’s just the bad cop we need to deal with.
Pierre: How?
Remco: We identify what is the cause for the problem. That is the bad cop! As soon as we have identified that, we next agree this crooked copper needs to be cut out of the system. During the process, when we are still working to get there, we do not speak of anyone getting blamed for anything. We allow our customer to say whatever he likes about that, but we don’t respond to it in any way.
Pierre: We let it stew? We work in our own way in order to identify what is the real cause of the problem, rather than finding the villain?
Remco: Yep. And as soon as we found out what is blocking the flow, what is the problem, we stick the bad cop label to it. No sooner, no later.
Pierre: So, in this way we leave his passion, often his real anger, trying to locate the source of any difficulty and kill it barehanded, intact.
Remco: We try to not cool that in any way. Keep the fire burning, but don’t get burned yourself. We make the customer associate his anger with the real problem.
Pierre: Rather associate it to that than to the guy sitting opposite, the poor and innocent project manager, with his loving missus and kids.
Remco: That’s it. Keep the passion intact, track down the real problem, attach the passion to that real problem—instead of the first sentiment that came to our customer’s mind.
Pierre: I might be able to deal with the tariff problem in a similar way, I gather.
Remco: That’s correct! The requesting customer has a problem. He needs a divine project manager, able to deal with all earthly crimes and make them go away by speaking in tongues. The customer should be made aware of the fact that is he looking for Zeus. And Zeus only comes at a fair price!
Pierre: So, I actually shouldn’t tell him to sod it. I’d better explain the Zeus-thing to him, allow him to get acquainted with lesser gods than Zeus, so he’ll in practice find out that there is a difference.
Remco: Following which, two things could happen. He either deflates his original ideas, so that a mere mortal will be able to deal with them without divine intervention, or he maintains the original standards and realizes that he will have to pay the Zeus-fee.
Pierre: He will probably end up with Mr. Bean handling his multimillion project.
Remco: In that way he will find out the true values of life. He might well end up herding goats in Italy.
Pierre: That would perhaps be better for himself, and for the world.
Remco: I think all project managers with some experience will more or less recognize the theme of my discussion. It illustrates how we should not fight our stubborn customers. Not even if we see that he is clearly in error. “Fighting never solved anything,” my grandmother used to say. (And she has put up a couple of fights in her time!)
However, we should not turn ourselves into punching bags—we usually do know our trade better than our customers. The best attitude is to remain aware of the situation at hand and focus on that rather than on finding the one guy that caused the problem (or who just revealed it and now is about to get the blame, as frequently is the case). We, the professionals, should focus on ways to solve the problem. We need to take the customer by the hand, explain the road to salvation to him, and lead the way toward the solution, and the steps ahead, in a rational, objective manner. The project manager is not the chief executioner. The customer should not take on the part of judge, either (but he can’t help it).
Offering solutions and ways to turn them into reality is the way to a customer’s heart. Slapping him in the face is not. Regardless of whether you are right or wrong, a fight will cause the project manager to lose.
And we might add to Remco’s last statement that he who loses his cool first, loses. Regardless of the internal turmoil working with a challenging customer may cause, it is still important to stay professional. That may mean taking a time-out or asking clarifying questions or remaining silent. The notion that “the customer is king” still applies, even when that customer is wrong.
ANOTHER APPROACH TO MANAGING CHALLENGING CUSTOMERS
Jose Solera is a very experienced project manager who has worked extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jose shared with us his approach to dealing with demanding customers:
Throughout my career I have noticed that some people prefer to say yes now when presented with a challenge instead of articulating what it is more likely to happen in the future. You could say they are being optimistic and accepting the challenge, but I would argue that what is more likely is that they are afraid to say no and address the issue now. Instead, they engage in wishful thinking.
As the saying goes, in project management bad news does not get better with age. So, from early on I have followed the policy of pointing out what I think is realistic and not just accepting the wishes of the client or manager.
One of the earliest examples was when I worked for a major high-technology firm. My manager, who also happened to be the client for a software development project, demanded that the system be developed and deployed in three months. As we had barely started and had no requirements, I could have said, “Yes, we’ll get it done by then,” then go hide in my cubicle, hoping I would somehow pull it off but knowing full well that was not likely. Instead, what I said was, “Yes, ma’am, but it is not going to happen. The simplest system takes three months. This one is not simple, and we don’t know yet what we are supposed to do.” Obviously, that was not what she wanted to hear, but I held my ground.
Soon afterwards, in a group design meeting, she pushed for a complete implementation of the entire system. Still gathering requirements, I worked with my peers, the business managers working for her, to convince them that a partial solution delivered soon was more valuable than a full solution that was going to take about a year. With this agreement in place, we presented it to our manager, who then accepted the direction. We successfully delivered the first piece of functionality soon thereafter and eventually achieved monthly production releases, what now would be considered standard in an Agile project.
Later in my career I had a situation where my project had been put on hold along with many others with no indication of when we would be allowed to proceed. My client, an internal product development group, was preparing to launch a new product and needed the capabilities I was supposed to deliver. I did not provide false expectations to the client. Instead, I said that while I was hoping we would be allowed to proceed soon, he should look at alternatives just in case. We were allowed to proceed a few weeks later with enough time to support the client. Still, at the planning session, once the client indicated his expectations of our delivery, I said, “Thank you for sharing your expectations. Let us see what we can do,” and explained what my team had planned. It turned out that the client’s expectations were not doable. As he was in the planning session with us, he was able to understand the amount of work we had to do. He accepted this plan (his group was facing challenges too). We proceeded to meet all of our commitments right on time.
This approach does not mean that the moment a problem surfaces, I run to the client to tell him or her the bad news. While I believe in full transparency and letting the client know what is going on, I also believe that presenting a problem without analysis and alternatives is not doing my job as a project manager. Instead, I wait a bit to ensure the problem is real, determine its impact, and figure out how it can be addressed prior to communicating it with the client. A thoughtful presentation of a problem, impact, and alternatives is more effective than either running up right away without the analysis or not telling the client about the issue and hoping for the best.
CUSTOMER ESCALATION
Having worked in field service and in factory marketing, I (Englund) became very aware of ways that customers get their demands satisfied—they escalate them to someone who has the authority to do something. On several occasions when I could not resolve an issue or did not have the authority to do so, I gave my boss’s phone number to the customer. Of course, I also went immediately to the boss and alerted him to the impending call. The boss then is in the difficult position of having to satisfy the customer as well as support the employee. The best outcomes occurred when both happened. Sometimes all the customer needs is for somebody in authority to listen to him. Those times call for exemplary listening skills and a suspension of defensiveness.
These experiences served me well when I was in the role of customer. One time I escalated a concern to a supervisor of a customer service representative. She was not helpful, so I asked to speak with her manager. She told me she was the end of the line—there was no one else. But I knew better; we all have bosses, even the CEO of a company. Her attitude upset me further, so I was determined to find another path. Searching the company’s website, I found email addresses for the CEO and regional managers. Soon after sending my email to these people, I received a phone call from a different manager, who then sent me a replacement for the defective product. I have repeated this process on several other occasions, even to terminate a cell phone service contract early due to poor reception. I find that escalation works. We also now have social networks, such as Facebook and YouTube, where concerns may be aired.
In another example, when we were planning a large potential companywide purchase, I insisted that a vendor provide a set of features that did not currently exist. To his credit, the sales representative did not make promises he could not keep or make up a false answer just to get the sale. He promised to check with the factory. He came back saying that it was not possible to fulfill the request. We placed the order with him anyway, largely because of the integrity he displayed during the sales negotiation.
I (Bucero) once managed an infrastructure and software implementation project for a customer in the north of Spain. It was a critical project for the Spanish government, and we could not fail as the service provider for that project. An issue arose: some hardware equipment would not arrive on time because there was a shipping delay from the factory. So I escalated the problem to the factory manager. I got good words but not good results. There was still a delay in shipping. I informed my sponsor about the issue, but nothing happened. I needed to make a decision, so I said to my customer, “Believe me, I did as much as I could, but I was not able to transmit to my sponsor the urgency of the problem. I suggest you complain to my sponsor about the problem.” So the customer called my sponsor and told him I was not supported by my organization. He said that he was conscious that I had put in the effort but did not get results, and he needed the hardware equipment soon. Immediately my sponsor called the manager of the factory. He was able to accelerate the equipment delivery, so the equipment arrived on time.
Complete project managers will find themselves on either or both sides of customer escalation issues. Know that escalation is a good thing. Sometimes we have to prompt others to escalate. Apply personal, sales, and negotiating skills. Successful outcomes depend upon persistent yet professional handling throughout the process.
Competition
A question that needs to be answered on every project is, “What is the market?” Our approach is to imagine the market as a set of customer needs or problems that you can achieve or solve, keeping in mind that there are several competitors who are trying to do the same thing. In order to describe a particular market, we can talk about market size, market classification (segments), and competition.
Market size is often predicted by companies specializing in market analysis. Find their results in trade publications and marketing reports.
Market segments are discovered, not invented. People and organizations naturally segment themselves based on their goals and interests. The challenge is to conduct surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observations to determine what those interests are. This involves a creative approach to discovery as well as perceptive analysis and integration of data to come up with meaningful market classifications.
Key competitors are organizations that are aiming at the same segment with a similar strategy and with solutions to the same problems. Knowing these competitors is essential to determining the outcome/feature set, price, and potential sales volume of your products. Every organization is looking for competitive advantage. That requires you, as a complete project manager, to know competitors very well, so you will be able to compare your solution to customers’ problems with your competitors’ solutions and can explain the difference to stakeholders and potential customers. In addition, when you know your competitors’ prices, you understand the need to set a price based on market conditions rather than the cost to create and produce the product. Price and volume estimates are essential for estimating cash flow. Potential sales volume will also be determined in part by competitor actions. Knowledge of competitor tendencies, hiring practices, and advertising help to predict their actions and reactions. Of course, you cannot accurately predict competitor actions and reactions, but it is possible to get insight by analysis.
Dealing with Customers
As a project manager from the services provider perspective, I (Bucero) am usually spending more time at the customer site than in my office. On some occasions, when managing customer projects in organizations, I was criticized by my manager who used sentences like, “Alfonso, you seem to belong to the customer organization, always defending the customer and never supporting my ideas or initiatives.” The real fact is that I was more than ten hours per day on the customer site. I understood very well my customer needs, and it was my obligation to listen to the customer. Through this contact, I could generate more business for my organization by understanding customer needs better.
We suggest four key points to consider when dealing with customers:
• Building customer credibility
• Risk sharing
• Benefits sharing
• The right attitude
Building customer credibility. It is a step-by-step process that takes a lot of time. The project manager needs to accomplish his/her commitments. One of my professional lessons learned is that customers buy by added value, they hire your services because you have been there, have the experience of doing it before and/or managed a similar project. Another ingredient to build up credibility is to take care about details with the customer. For instance, if a project manager promised the customer to send or present a status report every Friday, he/she needs to accomplish it. Practicing authenticity (say what you believe) and acting with integrity (act on what you say) help us to build customer credibility.
Risk sharing. I ran into problems with salespeople when I tried to share project risk among customers. Sentences like, “Alfonso, you cannot share our weaknesses with our customer because that fact is positioning us in a difficult situation; it is very dangerous.” I think differently about that. I believe that the risk identification process needs to be started before we prepare the solution proposal. As we are gathering customer requirements, we need to be a step forward and try to predict potential project risks and share them with our customer. Our solution proposal needs to be developed taking into account all risks identified. Most customers appreciate it because you, as a service provider, are expected to provide your experience on that. Project risk is not only on the provider side but on both sides, customer and provider.
Benefits sharing. Most projects do not deliver benefits quickly; they are delivering products or services. Benefits from projects take some time to happen. However, customer and provider need to be transparent about the benefit of working together. It is extremely valuable when we learn from each other. One of the benefits the customer can achieve is the knowledge transfer process from the provider (methodologies, discipline, processes); on the other hand, the customer may help the provider by sharing real industry experiences.
The right attitude. Customers always appreciate positive people when dealing with projects in organizations. They expect positive people who are able to inspire the project team while also maintaining a positive attitude at any moment during the project, under all circumstances. Most customer projects present challenging situations, or they provoke changes in the customer organization. They need inspiration and positivism to motivate all project stakeholders. Sentences like “today is a good day and tomorrow will be better” are needed. The customer needs a project manager from the provider who smiles every day and encourages the project team to move forward. Organizations do not manage projects, people do. Be positive as a project manager, and you will generate customer enthusiasm.
Market Forces
It is helpful to seek exposure to marketing gurus who write books and speak at professional association events. Connecting with these people allows you to gather information about market evolution, marketing trends, cycles, innovative practices, and competitive analysis. We invited marketing consultant and author Geoffrey Moore to speak at a company’s internal project management conference. I (Englund) briefed Geoffrey that the audience did not consist of upper managers or marketing-specific people, but rather project managers gathered from around the world.
Geoffrey began, “As project managers, you are used to an internal focus on completing your projects. What I want to share with you today is how your success is dependent on external market forces that you need to be aware of.” He then explained that a company can cross the chasm between new idea and market acceptance by getting a “beachhead” customer to adopt the product. Then the company has to develop a “whole product” that satisfies all concerns of pragmatic customers. When a company is “inside the tornado,” meaning that its product is the market leader, just ship the product as fast as possible, without making any changes.
If your company is the “chimp,” not the “gorilla”—the market leader—then service niches and do not try to compete directly against the leader. When your company is “on Main Street,” meaning that your product is maturing, keep enhancing and upgrading the product until it becomes obsolete. This is also the time to be thinking about new, innovative products.
Geoffrey also explained that making a product easy to use creates a competitive advantage. “I don’t know the difference between serial [port] with an s and cereal with a c, but this company made it simple to visualize with color-coded cables and a setup diagram.”
In my first product development project experience with HP, I (Englund) had just come from a field position at GE. Even though my previous experience was with a totally different product line, I knew how difficult it was to install equipment in the field if the factory did not cover all possibilities. I brought that field perspective to the project team and suggested we field-test new operating system installation procedures and include more detailed instructions.
The above examples convey a similar theme. Successful products come from thoughtful projects that consider all market forces throughout both product and project life cycles. Complete project managers know in what stage of market cycles the outcomes of their projects are. They keep the user perspective in mind and seek inputs that increase the usefulness of the final product.
Another way that market forces affect projects is the timing of market windows. We were moving quickly on a fast time-to-market personal computer project when marketing came to the core team with a request to delay introduction for several months. They explained that the introduction would get far more notice if it came at the spring trade show event. That is when the press and customers were on the lookout for new products. An off-cycle introduction may have gotten lost in the shuffle of everyday work.
With regard to market knowledge, Remco Meisner advises,
Some markets move swiftly. We, as project managers and with our projects, need to adjust our pace accordingly. There is ample time for guarding the quality of our work (we should insist on minimum time frames, however). Other markets seem like perpetuüm immobile (not going anywhere), whereas mankind keeps searching for perpetuüm mobile (an imaginary device that once in motion keeps moving by itself) markets. There also we need to blend in. The same rule applies to conservative as well as innovative projects. In whole, project managers will need to chameleonize.
With regard to customer orientation, Remco says, “Be your customer!”
Disruptions, Discontinuities, and Digitalization
Even though you have a marvelous project plan, don’t fall in love with it. Something is bound to change, whether the change comes from the market, a competitor, innovative ideas or technologies, or the client. Complete project managers need to be flexible and attuned, so as not to get hurt by these changes.
In describing “The Coming Wave of Digital Disruption,” Leslie H. Moeller, Nicholas Hodson, and Martina Sangin (2018) posit that technological changes foreshadow a dramatic—but manageable—shift in business logic everywhere. Here is an adapted summary of that article:
All disruption (digital or otherwise) takes place on an industry-wide scale, forcing a significant shift in profitability from one prevailing business model to another. The new model typically provides customers with the same or better value at a much lower cost. Companies wedded to the old business model lose ground, and some are pushed out of business. Challengers that embrace the new business model gain advantage and take a dominant position in the market.
The current wave of disruption is unprecedented. Digital disruption is a change in industry value triggered by advances in information and communications technology. Products and processes will routinely learn from their surroundings; markets will converge to an unprecedented extent. The new wave of technological advance is expected to alter a wide array of business practices, in nearly every sector, and in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer firms.
Although the pace of disruption is unpredictable, the time to act is now, for three reasons. First, preparations for these changes require time. As when a hurricane is bearing down on a coastline, the longer you wait to act, the more vulnerable you become. The precise tipping point will vary from one industry to the next, but some common threads will emerge. Prices will decrease, assets will lose value, and the willingness of customers to change their habits will determine the pace of change. This is happening to some old-model retailers now; their businesses may not be formally bankrupt, but the dollars they invest in their legacy businesses don’t earn a return. So, they cut back their spending, and their stores deteriorate further.
Second, even during the earliest stages, before they reach that tipping point and lose their industry position, incumbents tied to old business models often see their growth level off or decline. Old-model retail store chains, for example, have felt the impact on their shareholder value years before they approach bankruptcy. That’s why it’s important to let constituents, particularly investors and key stakeholders, know that you are preparing to face major changes. The most effective activist investors are already aware of which companies are well positioned for digital disruption. Those that aren’t clearly making such preparations tend to become targets.
Third, although the pace of change can be glacial, glaciers cannot be avoided. Disruption will, eventually, reach its destination. This was the essence of Clayton M. Christensen’s (2018) argument in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, that the disruptive innovation is at first applied to a small, unattractive niche, and it seems easy to ignore. Gradually it matures, improves in quality and capability, and then switches over to the mainstream. In the early stages of its advance, it will seem to many people as though nothing is happening. By the time the shift is felt, it will seem sudden. But if you’ve started early to prepare, you’ll be ready for it.
Digital disruptions are different in several critical ways. They involve technologies that can reduce the need for physical assets; for example, streaming media took the place of compact discs, and algorithms that specify traffic routes for shared-vehicle enterprises can raise the efficiency of passenger travel and thus reduce the number of cars and vans needed in an area. Digital systems accumulate data and, through machine learning, continually improve the performance of the new business models, thereby accelerating their impact. Digital disruptions reshape value chains and markets, rendering old differences among sectors irrelevant; now a single home device can be a music player, a thermostat, a security system, and a retail portal.
Discontinuities and disruptions affect a broad number of sectors, and they encourage companies to add scale by creating platforms that make it cheaper to enter new geographies or launch new products and services. Another effect is the increased demand in a broad range of industries for people with software skills (which are more fungible than other forms of engineering prowess) and a Silicon Valley sensibility.
To respond effectively to disruptions, a company, through the projects and programs it sponsors, needs to reinvent itself, moving from one business model to another. The future of your enterprise will depend on how well you understand these dynamics in your industry and in general. Focus on strategic changes that reflect and incorporate your own existing strengths, as opposed to those that may impress investors in the short run but not add to your sustained performance.
The wave of digital disruption will have far-reaching effects. Already, digital technology has shown its ability to outpace or outmaneuver efforts to control it. The constraint for any company will not be the technology. It will be ability to bring three drivers to bear: to lower costs, engage customers, and make better use of assets. If you can employ digital technology to do that effectively, you will be among the winners of the age of digital disruption.
Servant Leadership
What is servant leadership? In his essay “The Servant as Leader” (1970), Robert Greenleaf writes, “The servant-leader is servant first …. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.”
Servant leadership as a concept has validity in all aspects of project, program, and portfolio management. It has special meaning when applied to market and customer knowledge. Complete project managers realize that their mission is not just to produce project outputs but to produce outcomes that support customers and end users. It also means they serve the people who are doing the work on their projects.
Michael O’Brochta shared with us his experiences in applying servant leadership to project-based work:
I did not know over forty years ago when I joined the Central Intelligence Agency as a young electrical engineer fresh out of college that my first two bosses would practice servant leadership. In fact, the term servant leadership had not yet been popularized. It was not until 1977 that Robert Greenleaf wrote the breakthrough book titled Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness.
What I did know at that time was that I was being treated to a workplace environment unlike most others … and it was terrific. I found myself working for a pair of bosses who acted with authority; they told me what they expected of me. This did not surprise me. As a new employee in a sizable government organization, I had expected to be told what to do—the chain-of-command approach characteristic in many organizations was certainly being practiced in the part of the CIA that I was hired into. I was told what security countermeasures projects I would work on, who the internal customers were that I needed to form relationships with, and what contractors I needed to involve in meeting our requirements. As a new and inexperienced employee, I needed to be told what to do; I did not have the wherewithal to succeed otherwise. What surprised me is what came next, what I later learned to refer to as servant leadership. What came next was the question from my bosses, “What can I do to help?”
Both of these bosses took an active interest in my project success. While they clearly conveyed the message that I was the one responsible for the project outcome—“It is your job to fix it,” one of them would repeatedly say to me—they also made it clear that they were there to help me. I was not alone. They understood that I could not succeed alone. They asked me questions that they knew my inexperience would prevent me from knowing the answers to … and then they offered me the answers. “Who else is using the type of technology we require in our projects?” would come the question. “I do not know,” would be my response. “Then you should go talk to so-and-so,” would be their advice. And so it went. I was being led by bosses who were serving my needs as an inexperienced project manager.
So powerful was this experience, that later in my career at the CIA when I began filling roles as the boss, I would try to emulate the servant leadership style. Most of the employees who would report to me had levels of experience with other bosses prior to working for me. I found that by and large, these employees had not had the same terrific experience that I had had so early in my career. Most of the employees who reported to me had not experienced servant leadership. They had been more often exposed to the command-and-control, top-down, the-boss-is-always-right approach. And why not: wasn’t that the way in most organizations? Apparently so. Now they found themselves working for a boss who behaved differently. A boss who took a genuine interest in what they needed to succeed. Interestingly, it took some getting used to on their part. The level of mutual respect and trust associated with the practice of servant leadership was a bit unfamiliar to many of the employees.
They were quick to embrace this servant-leadership workplace environment. It caused powerful boss–employee bonds to be formed. I think that it resulted in much higher levels of project and mission success, and that, after all, is why we worked for the CIA.
Michael’s early work experience taught him that he needed to get outside a narrow focus on just doing the project and to view serving people, customers, and end users as the purpose of work.
Mounir A. Ajam, founder and CEO of SUKAD FZ-LLC, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, shares a personal testimonial on servant leadership and working with clients and teams:
A few years ago, I was working on a project for the engineering and construction of a world-class petrochemical plant in Texas. The project was a joint venture among three partners and was managed by an integrated project management team representing the three partners. I was seconded to the team in the capacity of project control manager.
Early in the project engineering phase, the project management team brought in a team development consultant to facilitate a team-building session. The sessions were a mix of meetings and discussions and various outdoor activities. At the end of every day, the participating team members had to give each other feedback. Each person was to state two points: a positive point and an improvement point.
At that time, I was not too patient, and it seems that I always wanted to move fast even when some team members might not have been ready.
When it was time for the others to give me feedback, a colleague, Mr. Wes Agnew, said, “Mounir, I have one comment that is positive and constructive at the same time … you have to be careful. You seem to be quite smart, and you rush to get on the bus—but remember not to leave until everyone else might be on the bus.” His point was that due to my impatience I might alienate other team members who were not ready to move as fast as I liked to.
I took that feedback to heart and did reflect on it for a while. I also recall another colleague telling me, “Mounir, you are impatient with incompetence.” I do agree that I am. Nothing frustrates me more than incompetence—which in my definition is someone who is not competent but acts as if he or she were a master.
Back to the team-building session: so, what was the issue? Were my colleagues incompetent? Most of them were not incompetent; they were highly capable and qualified people. I kept searching, and what I found is that some people are risk takers… and I am one. I also learned that one characteristic that differentiates leaders from managers is that leaders might run on limited facts and instincts and make decisions, whereas managers need more and more information for decision making.
At that time, because of the above situation and other factors, I started to recognize that I have more leadership attributes than managerial attributes. I have done well in my various team lead roles, but I really do not like to manage. As a result, I accepted and understood the feedback.
Since that time, every time I am in a situation where I think we are ready to move but notice that not everyone is ready, I recall the “bus” feedback, and I slow down. However, I do also recognize that some people might take forever to get on the bus. So, what do we do?
As an entrepreneur and business leader, I try to balance my instinct and desire to move fast with having to get the buy-in and support of my team. Therefore, the way I now work with any team is that I get to the bus quickly, and I will stay at the bus, explaining, sharing, and encouraging team members, to get the team to join me on the journey. I will wait for others, but only for a while. I tell my team, “Let me know if you are not ready to board, and I will do my best to ease the transition and explain why we need to be on the bus. However, we can wait only for a while.” If some hesitate too much or cannot make up their minds, then we leave without them!
That simple feedback and few words from many years ago still resonate with me, and I share it with others. It has helped me on numerous occasions, not only with my team but also working with volunteers in a not-for-profit environment. I have learned that leaders have responsibilities to be servant leaders and lead by consensus. We cannot lead if we leave the people who trusted us behind or alienated.
In closure, I have to admit that this does not always work. At times our patience line could be quite elastic and other times quite brittle. We continue to learn and improve as we travel this wonderful journey we call life!
Value Proposition
A value proposition can be defined as “a promise of value to be delivered” and the customer’s belief that it will experience value. It is based on a review and analysis of the benefits, costs, and value that an organization can deliver to its customers, prospective customers, and other constituent groups within and outside the organization. It is also a positioning of value, where Value = Benefits—Cost (cost includes risk).
In marketing, a customer value proposition (CVP) consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises a customer will receive in return for the customer’s associated payment (or other value transfer). A customer value proposition is a business or marketing statement that describes why a customer should buy a product or use a service. It is specifically targeted toward potential customers rather than other constituent groups such as employees, partners, or suppliers. It is a clearly defined statement that is designed to convince customers that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than others in its competitive set.
The marketing function typically is responsible for creating the value proposition on projects. The project manager works with marketing to address and refine these statements to clearly identify the problem being solved by the project, how important that problem is, what the value will be when the solution is implemented, and what the benefit will be. If no marketing team member or business analyst is involved, it still remains an imperative for the complete project manager to develop a value proposition for each project. The value proposition may be similar to a project objectives statement, which says what the project does, for whom, by when, and how much it costs. A value proposition clearly adds customer benefits into the objectives statement equation.
Organizational Ethics: Defining and Preserving a Heritage
We called upon ethics consultant, author, and professor Dr. David W. Gill to share with us the role of ethics in dealing with how people in organizations can establish and inculcate company values when it comes to dealing not only with employees but also with customers and clients. Here are highlights from his account of a consulting engagement he worked on:
The Harris & Associates founder had a recurring concern in 2004 as he thought about the company he had built over the previous three decades. Of course, he felt a good deal of pride and satisfaction as well. What started in 1974 had grown to nearly 400 employees, the largest number of whom worked out of the California headquarters, with others based in several branch offices around the western United States.
Industry recognition began to come: business was strong; new opportunities beckoned; talented people lined up to apply for jobs. Harris’s reputation and brand were strong in the industry.
Of concern was how to ensure the continuation of the characteristics that had made the company what it was. A company spokesperson said, “We were at a stage where we had to be proactive in defining our company values and our way of doing business. It’s not even that we wanted to be critical of our competitors, but we simply did not want to drift away from our values toward whatever others were doing in the industry.”
One had only to read the daily newspapers to see how good reputations and sound ethics could overnight take a huge hit from which they might not recover. No company was immune to criticism and serious risk. In 2004, one of Harris’s senior executives crossed an important behavioral line, which led to his removal. “The necessary removal of a senior executive for misconduct was a powerful message to me that we must pay more attention to our ethics from top to bottom in the company,” said the company founder.
Previously, Harris had to stop a situation in a regional office that violated their values and ethics. A proposal to a prospective client listed as a member of the team a talented individual who was not a current Harris employee—but who had agreed to defect from his current employer if the contract came through. This was a clear deception that contradicted what Harris stood for. Similar situations occurred among competitors: a company might send in a team of its star performers to make a proposal for a project—but then take those stars off the team when the project actually began. “Others might do that, but that is not our way,” said the founder.
“We also were aware that some of our competitors were compromising both ethical and legal standards to curry favor with prospective clients and win contracts. One of our competitors invited clients to its end-of-year party and rigged its best gift giveaways to go to precisely those clients who would be deciding where upcoming contracts would be awarded.” In an increasingly competitive environment like this, what could Harris & Associates do to stay on course, resist temptation, and take the ethical high road?
If an ethics question concerning how to deal with a difficult client or situation arises in a branch office, wouldn’t it be likely that a newer recruit might offer something like, “Well, here is how we handled decisions like that when I was at Halliburton” (or Bechtel, or …). Could anything be done proactively to ensure the preservation of the Harris way of doing business in all locations where the company expanded?
“We prided ourselves on being a maverick firm. We didn’t want lots of org charts and official policies and bureaucracy. We were a family. With our growth and expansion, with more staff and more regional offices, we realized that we really must be more intentional and clear about how we operate. Otherwise people, especially our new hires, might be confused. This was not just true about our ethics and values but about all aspects of our organization and management: it was time to define and clarify what our company was all about,” the spokesperson said.
From the beginning, Harris & Associates decided to concentrate on the public works arena rather than serve private real estate developers and builders. “A city or county agency would always know that we would not one day work for them and the next day show up representing a private developer seeking something from that same public agency. It eliminated a huge source of potential conflicts of interest,” the spokesperson explained.
After a number of conversations along the lines of “We really need to think about developing a code of ethics of some sort to put in print the standards we believe in,” I [David Gill] was brought in to discuss the development of an ethics program. Two basic choices were highlighted. First, the board needed to decide on its ethics-project leadership, and second, a choice needed to be made regarding the scope of the project. The initial ethics project goal was to figure out and articulate the mission and vision of the company. The goal of organizational ethics and values was not just “staying out of court and out of jail” (a minimalist, damage-control approach). Rather, the point would be to provide guidance on “what kind of company we need to be” and “how we need to treat one another—and all our stakeholders—in order to excel and succeed in accomplishing our mission and achieving our vision.” The organization wanted a mission-driven, rather than problem-driven or damage-control, approach to its ethics.
“Unlike many other companies, our ‘bottom line’ is not our ‘bottom line.’ Our company wants to be financially successful, and we have been. But our focus is not merely on our financial ROI but on people—on our employees, clients, and communities. The irony is that focusing on people is good for business. For example, something like 70 percent of our business is repeat business. So, in the end, it makes good business sense to invest in our ethics,” the company spokesperson said.
The Harris mission was to “help our clients succeed.” Harris people were consulting engineers and project managers for hire. How did they help their clients succeed? Through “industry-leading management and consulting services.” Harris’s vision for its company was not to be the biggest gorilla in the industry but to be “the excellence and integrity leader” in the arenas where it operated. Designing and managing publicly funded public works projects was a responsibility gladly accepted, and helping communities succeed was a critical part of what the company wanted to do. But the company also existed to help its own employees succeed in their careers.
Because it was their job to be concerned with every aspect of the entire company, the primary creators and guardians of the mission and vision were, of necessity, the top executives and the board of directors. These were the roles best positioned to see—and most responsible for—the whole. Yet it would have violated the Harris culture for the mission and vision to be imposed by a simple edict from the top. Harris wanted broad buy-in—as well as expertise, should there be any suggestions for improvement—on its mission and vision statements. Thus, the statements were viewed and described as provisional until all managers and employees in the company had an opportunity to examine and comment on them.
It would now fall to the rank and file in Harris’s business trenches to play the major role in creating and implementing ethical guidelines for the day-to-day business practices of the company. The spokesperson said, “It was a natural extension of our culture of respecting all of our employees to ask their participation in creating our code of ethics.”
Participants were given a one-page code of ethics questionnaire that asked five questions:
1. What are the basic tasks that make up your workdays?
2. What basic written guidelines should be given to a new (or uncertain) employee for each of those basic work practices, to avoid getting into trouble and to ensure excellence and ethics in the task?
3. What are the most significant temptations and problems that can arise in your work area?
4. What written guidelines would help new or uncertain employees avoid trouble or ethical missteps when faced with each of these challenges?
5. Can you suggest any other important rules or guidelines that should be part of our code of ethics, guiding all of us, all the time?
After much work, a holistic, comprehensive, aligned account of the “Harris Way”—the mission, vision, core values, and ethical guidelines of the company—had been identified and articulated with the broad participation of virtually the whole company workforce. A checklist was provided to help employees and managers reflect on whether a particular concern was important enough to take action:
• Is it illegal?
• Does it violate our company values and ethical guidelines?
• Does it violate the golden rule or our internal sense of right and wrong?
• Would we be doing this if it were to become the lead story in the news?
• Could someone be seriously and irresponsibly harmed?
Warning lights or red flags on any of these tests meant that employees should report the question or concern.
The ethics and values heritage of Harris & Associates certainly seemed to be well-defined and articulated. There could be no excuses on the part of new or old, near or distant people when it came to the ethics and values at the heart of the Harris Way. Harris’s mission, vision, values, and ethical standards were readily available in writing, in clear and understandable language. The company spokesperson said, “All of us on the executive leadership team at Harris were satisfied, even delighted, not just by our product but by the process we had followed. You can’t hold people accountable if you don’t make clear what they are accountable for. That is part of how the Harris Way helps us run the company. Of course, now that we have stated these values and standards, the employees are free to hold us managers and leaders accountable for them also!”
Harris had taken a major stride forward in carefully articulating its values and ethics, but it would all be a waste of time if they did not make the right moves going forward on the communication, training, and implementation tasks. With my help, they designed a program to communicate the content of the company mission, vision, core values, and ethical guidelines to everyone in the company and to understand the meaning, nuances, and application of the Harris Way to specific concrete circumstances.
David summarizes, “My consulting, writing, and teaching approach sees ethics and excellence as intimate partners. Excellent project management will be ethical project management. Doing things right is related to doing the right thing. And vice versa. I often write making that exact case: why ethics and values are critical to successful, effective, sustainable project management. It is a great story how the managers of Harris & Associates and I worked on their project to get their values and ethics identified, communicated, implemented, and now evaluated.” Having clearly defined values and ethics also means that customers can rely on and benefit by doing business with an organization.
Summary
Complete project managers need to stay focused on marketing and customer issues that guide their projects and programs. These include determining who potential customers are and what they want; learning who competitors are and what they are offering; understanding trade-offs among product performance attributes of benefits, features, and price; and determining ideal timing for market introduction. Seek out and pay attention to market forces. Be aware of and adaptable to market changes caused by disruptions and digitalization. Ensure that project outcomes add value to markets, customers, and end users.
Apply a servant leadership approach when dealing with customers. Develop skills for interacting with challenging customers. Stay professional during issue escalations to preserve relationships and keep customers satisfied. Remember that serving customers is the purpose for most project work. Be ever mindful of how important ethical behavior is to the ongoing success of any organization. Integrate customer and market skills into all projects.