Effective Software Project Management

From the Perspective of the Customer

Your customer wants to and expects to be number one on your list of priorities. Many also expect to tell you what they want and then have you deliver it at some later point in time with minimal involvement on their part. How often have you heard, “Oh, that’s a technology project, and we don’t know much about technology. Just do what we have asked.” That’s a signal that trouble is just waiting to happen. The biggest challenge to many project managers and their development teams is to engage the customer in a meaningful way over the entire course of the project life cycle.

The more your customer has been involved with you and your team on past projects, the more likely you are to be successful with the full spectrum of strategies. From those previous projects, both you and the customer have learned how to work effectively with each another. A certain level of trust, honesty, and openness has been established. That will have a direct payoff to the next project.

Your ability to speak the language of the customer rather than dazzling them with your technical brilliance is the key. Keep your focus on the business not on the technology.

As previously discussed, that level of customer involvement varies with the adopted strategy. For Linear and Incremental SDPM strategies that involvement is minimal because of the assumption that requirements, functions, and features have been identified and fully documented. As you change adopted strategies to the ...