Customer Driven Project Management

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There has been a sea-change in the focus of organizations - whether private or public - away from a traditional product- or service-centricity towards customer-centricity and projects are just as much a part of that change. Projects must deliver value; projects must involve stakeholders, and Elizabeth Harrin and Phil Peplow demonstrate convincingly that stakeholders are the ones who get to decide what ’value’ actually means. Customer-Centric Project Management is a short guide explaining what customer-centricity means in terms of how you work and its importance for project performance; using tools and processes to guide customer-centric thinking will help you see the results of engagement and demonstrate how things can improve, even on difficult projects. The text provides a straightforward implementation guide to moving your own business to a customer-centric way of working, using a model called Exceed and provides some guidance for ensuring that customer-centricity is sustainable and supported in the organization. This is a practical, rigorous and well-researched text. It draws on established models and uses the example of project implementation in a healthcare environment to demonstrate the impact of this significant way of thinking about value. The authors can’t guarantee that the Exceed process will radically improve project success rates, and no process can. Adopting a customer-centric mindset and using the Exceed process to measure and monitor customer satisfaction will, however, help you move towards working with happier, more engaged stakeholders.

In the traditional view of project management, if a project manager completed a project and had adhered to the triple constraints of time, cost, and performance, the project was considered a success. Today, in the eyes of the customer and the parent or sponsoring company, if a completed project did not deliver its anticipated value, it would be seen as a failure. Today's changing economic climate, marked by an increasingly competitive global environment, is driving project managers to become more business oriented. Projects must now be viewed from a strategic perspective within the context of a business or enterprise that needs to provide value to both the customer and the organization itself. As a result, project managers are now required to possess the skills to complete a project within certain specifications, and also know how to create and deliver value. Responding to the needs of today's project managers, Value-Driven Project Management begins by changing the paradigm of project management. Rather than judge the success of a project from the perspectives of time, budget, and quality, the authors demonstrate why success is only achieved when planned business values are met, including: Internal value Financial value Future value Customer-related value The authors also offer best practices that allow you and your organization to create additional value in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and enhanced products and services. Finally, the book helps you incorporate value into clearly defined business objectives and "sell" the value-driven process to executives. Throughout the book, helpful illustrations clarify complex concepts and processes. Assigning valuable resources to projects that don't provide some tangible form of value to the organization and to the client is poor management and poor decision-making. On the other hand, selecting and implementing projects that will deliver value and an acceptable return on investment is effective management and decision-making, but is very challenging, especially when a project may not provide its target value for years to come. With Value-Driven Project Management in hand, you'll discover the tools you need to ensure that projects deliver true value upon their completion.

Project management is seeing a shift away from managing by the triple constraint of time, cost and quality, towards ensuring the delivery of organisational value. The increased interest and take up in Project, Programme and Portfolio Offices (P3Os) demonstrates this.

In this book, the author attacks these and other pressing issues facing today's academic librarians. Her trailbrazing strategies centre on keeping the customer's point of view in focus at all times to help you to integrate technology to meet today's student and faculty needs.

How to Ensure That the Customer Is Truly Your Number One Priority How do winning organizations such as General Electric, Ericsson, and Nokia use project management to reduce time to market, trim inventory and supplier costs, and minimize obsolescence in their product lines? Why do so many companies fail when trying to do the same? In Building Customer-Based Project Organizations, two inter-nationally recognized project management gurus reveal the secrets behind these fabulous successes. Jeffrey Pinto and Pekka Rouhiainen demonstrate that building and maintaining long-term customer relationships is the key to successful project management, offering a method and an implementation strategy that companies can use to streamline their development and supply chain operations. This manual for success shows project managers how to: Place the customer at the center of the company's operational strategy Use customer needs to drive project development and supply chain management Deliver greater value to the customer and the business Increase efficiency, responsiveness, and profitability By following the clearly stated principles and methodology presented in Building Customer-Based Project Organizations, companies in any business sector can "get it right" the first time and build long-term customer relationships that will continue to increase profitability far into the future.

Despite the wide acceptance of Lean approaches and customer-development strategies, many product teams still have difficulty putting these principles into meaningful action. That’s where The Customer-Driven Playbook comes in. This practical guide provides a complete end-to-end process that will help you understand customers, identify their problems, conceptualize new ideas, and create fantastic products they’ll love. To build successful products, you need to continually test your assumptions about your customers and the products you build. This book shows team leads, researchers, designers, and managers how to use the Hypothesis Progression Framework (HPF) to formulate, experiment with, and make sense of critical customer and product assumptions at every stage. With helpful tips, real-world examples, and complete guides, you’ll quickly learn how to turn Lean theory into action. Collect and formulate your assumptions into hypotheses that can be tested to unlock meaningful insights Conduct experiments to create a continual cadence of learning Derive patterns and meaning from the feedback you’ve collected from customers Improve your confidence when making strategic business and product decisions Track the progression of your assumptions, hypotheses, early ideas, concepts, and product features with step-by-step playbooks Improve customer satisfaction by creating a consistent feedback loop