Phil Walnock - Real Customers and Project Management
During his lengthy career, Phil Walnock has seen time and time again that many project managers think that their project sponsor is the ultimate customer. While the sponsor may be responsible for money allocation and be the ultimate approval authority, the sponsor isn’t always the actual client. The real clients are the ones that are going to be using your service or product once the project is completed.
This is very important to understand because the project sponsor may be removed from the day-to-day realities and requirements of the actual final users and not be fully qualified to make some of the decisions pertaining to the project. Sometimes the organization that orders a project may have a gap between what management thinks and what employees actually do. This is why you always want to get the perspective of the final users. The difference between project sponsors and project users is similar to the difference between technical and functional requirements. You need to take them both into consideration but do so separately. The management needs to provide you with requirements. The users need to provide feedback on the implementation of the requirements in the real world.
One of the ways to identify and meet the requirements in project management is to utilize a proper work breakdown structure or WBS. A WBS dictionary will provide you with details in regards to different groups of tasks. Although using such a dictionary may seem like a lot of work, this work can help you avoid many issues that can occur in the future. This is one of the tools successful project managers like Phil Walnock use to effectively manage their projects.