Once you have determined the statement of intent, objectives for the visits, a list of customers to visit, and confirmed the venues where you will hold the meetings, you now need to get the right level of organizational buy-in to make sure your program is properly funded and resourced. To do this, you will probably need the buy-in of your management team or your sponsor. As part of the buy-in process, it would be advisable for you to create the right level of expectations. I would consider putting together two additional things at a minimum to present to your management or sponsor:

The budget should include an estimate of resource commitment required (and could include their fully loaded cost if you have access to it), as well as an estimate of travel, meals, and lodging expenses. If you also require some sort of model or screen-mock ups for the interviews, or any other extraneous expenses, I would list them as well.

The project plan should provide visibility to the management team or sponsor of how long this process should actually take before something actionable will come out of it. I find it is critical to set this expectation lest the management might mistakenly believe that you will be done well before you have completed your interviews or your post-interview analysis. If you have access to a tool such as MS Project, you can create a Gantt chart. You can also find other free tools online to represent your high-level Gantt chart using programs such as Excel, as shown in Figure 5.5:

Figure 5.5: Customer VoC Gantt chart

One might also consider putting all of the information you have acquired to this point into a more formalized project charter. In addition to the preceding two items, the charter should also document the overall scope of the project, the purpose of the set of visits, and the desired objectives from the visits. You should also document who will be part of the overall team and what their individual responsibilities are.