To what extent will the understanding of Customer/User experience help improve the bottom line of businesses?
Continuing on thoughts around maturity and the evolution of project management…the PMI-Silicon Valley Chapter is hosting their 10th Anniversary Dinner next month, and joining the festivities will be Stanford Advanced Project Management’s Dr Christopher Meyer to share his insight on how the future of project management will play a role in delivering a good customer experience. Chapter President Harish Chinai and I recently had a conversation on this topic, and thought we’d see what others in the group have to say. Here’s a synopsis from Harish:
“I can speak from my own experience managing a large CRM project in a hardware company. The business had budgeted a large sum for the implementation so that sales and marketing could better track the customer revenues – and hopefully improve the revenues per customer. Unfortunately, a funny thing happened along the way. The CRM did not capture the customer dissatisfaction that was brewing and instead of increasing the revenue the company lost some customers. Marketing surveyed the customers and identified the underlying issues and found the culprit: poor customer experience with some product lines.
Have you noticed how PMI has recently changed its tag line to “Making Project Management Indispensable for Better Business Results”? I have noticed more and more that job requirements are now asking for a PMP certification. Do you think in future they will ask Project Managers to demonstrate that they have in their previous projects successfully and measurably improved customer experience?
Just as organizations are improving their maturity by standardizing the project management methodologies and implementing rigorous training and coaching of their project managers, I will not be surprised if they add the Customer experience metrics to their performance evaluation. I will be interested to hear what others think in this community about the future of the Project Management in the coming years.”
