Grating expectations

Alan S. Horowitz   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other Project Management Stories  

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August 22, 2005 (Computerworld) -- The IT project was a success. It was on time and on budget, and it did what it was supposed to. The only problem: The customer wasn't happy. The project manager had provided written weekly status reports, just as the customer had requested, but he had missed the crucial second step: asking for feedback. The project manager learned too late that you can never assume you know what a customer is thinking -- you have to ask. Because he failed to do that, the customer was resentful, says Naomi Karten, a principal at Randolph, Mass.-based training and consulting firm Karten Associates. "The information [the customer] was given didn't mesh with what he was looking for, [but] he didn't take any steps to ask for what he really wanted," she observes.
Welcome to a world where even successful IT projects can be deemed failures if the customer expected something other than what IT delivered. To survive and prosper, you have to learn how to manage what customers expect.
First, it's important to understand how skewed expectations arise. "Unreasonable expectations almost always come from a misunderstanding," says Dan Bent, director of claims technology at The Nyhart Co., a financial services firm in Indianapolis.
The sources of these misunderstandings are varied. Some are based on incorrect assumptions. "The expectation is that IT is like the power company," says Garrett Granger, CIO of office supply manufacturer Dixon Ticonderoga Co. in Heathrow, Fla. "[Users] expect the lights to go on," he says, "and the only time you hear from them is when the lights don't go on."
History often raises false expectations, says Rick Giese, e-commerce development manager at Great Lakes Educational Loan Services Inc. in Madison, Wis. If a previous project didn't go well, the customer's expectations may be negative, he says, and no matter how well IT performs, it may not be able to overcome them.
A directive from the top can create expectations that IT will have trouble meeting, says Nate Root, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Consider the sales executive who decrees that his department needs a new system to track customers. Because the executive thinks he knows what's needed, he does no research, nor does he want IT to spend the time and money to develop good user requirements. IT is left having to fulfill expectations that have never really been vetted.
Sometimes customers aren't sure what they expect. Especially with a large project that takes time to complete, expectations may evolve. "The technology doesn't change as quickly as people's minds change," says Karten.
Unattainable expectations may arise from outside the company, says Anita Leto, director of IT transformation at

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Grating expectations

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