Managing Expectations: Working with People Who Want More, Better, Faster, Sooner, NOW!

7. Understand Your Customers’ Context

Study the problem before you solve it

If you singlemindedly focus on your customers’ immediate problems, without considering them in a broader business context, you may overlook the way the problematic situation interacts with other processes and activities both in and outside the organization. Even if you succeed in solving the immediate problem, you might create another one to take its place—and the subsequent problem might be bigger than the first. Customers might reasonably view such an outcome as a failure to meet their expectations.

To prevent this type of outcome, you must ensure that information-gathering efforts examine the problem from all possible perspectives. As Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg ...