Ideaticus.com

I am a developer and I always want to maximize customer satisfaction. Any project manager should take care of customer satisfaction. Let me “sell” you few tips about how to maximize their effort.

First of all you have to understand that working with programmers is very difficult because they tend to be very individualistic people. That’s why, as a customer, always communicate only with the project manager. Try to be friendly and approachable, request as many details as possible and try to avoid questions like “Isn’t ready yet? Why it takes so long?”. Treat the team as a partner. It’s very important to like you. The quality of the application depends on it.

Any project starts with a plan. Be sure your ideas are well understood and the plan is materialized in a prioritized feature list. Avoid, as much as possible, feature changes in this list because any important change will generate delays for the final release of your project. Once the feature list is ready and the team starts the development process, make sure they will make deliveries from time to time. This will not help you very much, but will put some pressure on them and you can be sure your project benefits of their full attention.

Good communication is essential. Plan short meetings from time to time and congratulate them while asking for details about future development plans from project manager. Programmers are motivated by challenge but the challenge needs to be friendly and indirectly served through their managers.

Maybe you ask yourself right now why you need to take care of all this stuff if you are a customer. I told you working with programmers is a very difficult thing and if you want to see the job done in time, you better involve your self in the process. Sometimes a miscommunication problem may lead to disaster. Keeping an eye on the development process is your assurance for the success of the project and later, the success of your business.

At the end make sure the project is well documented, is strongly tested and meets the initial requirements. Also testing scenarios are very helpful for future problems investigation. If the application wasn’t well tested before the release, your business is in trouble.

If you have in-house development team, keep the customer - service provider relationship in the same manner as discussed. Also offshore outsourcing have some special particularities but I’ll write about them in a future article.

Comments RSS