Ultimately, program managers are judged on results. Creating a positive program culture that facilitates excellent project management should produce excellent results. Having the correct program manager attributes, knowing how to manage stakeholders, implementing the most effective program process strategy, deploying good execution processes, building strong program teams, planning well-organized program communication processes, performing change management, ensuring thorough risk management, and linking the program to organizational strategy are pathways to program clarity and success.
This 5 part Guide to Positive Program Outcomes helps you assess the success of your programs.
Part 1 of 5: Creating Positive Customer Satisfaction
Part 2 of 5: Institutionalize Plagiarism
Part 3 of 5: Program Performance Analysis Metrics
Part 4 of 5: Program Performance Analysis Judgment
Part 5 of 5: Closing Thoughts
Part 1 of 5: Creating Positive Customer Satisfaction
Nothing creates customer satisfaction like doing a good job. Although framing success is important, managing the customer’s perception of the process and deliverables is equally important. Thus, a good job, good framing, and managing the customer’s perception are all elements of customer satisfaction.
Despite all the benefits of partnering and concurrent engineering from the perspective of customer satisfaction, you need to isolate the customer as much as possible from the messiness of creating the deliverable. This is not always possible, but the program manager needs to understand and communicate to project managers and program staff that the customer does not need to know everything. Customer satisfaction with the deliverable has been torpedoed many times by technical personnel who dwell on the negative aspects of the deliverable even when those negatives are grossly outweighed by positive aspects. Perception plays an important role in customer satisfaction and must be managed.
The plan is smooth, but the actual implementation is filled with ups and downs and adjustments. Therefore, create with the customer a threshold for when you will communicate things that are beyond the normal status. In fact, the program manager can have the same type of agreement with project managers about their projects, establishing thresholds for when they must come to the program manager for guidance with a problem or issue. This eliminates a lot of unnecessary communication or fuss about items unworthy of discussion and ensures that project managers seek the program manager’s guidance when they are in trouble.
Maximizing customer satisfaction with perception control is not about keeping the customer in the dark but about communicating the things that make the customer feel good about the product or service. . Although the customers may insist on seeing how the sausage is made, don’t expect them to enjoy it as much when they know how it’s processed. Your job is to distract them so that they don’t see the gory parts unless that is absolutely necessary for the success of the deliverable.
Once your team has decided on their plan and process, PPM software can help you execute that process. WorkOtter helps you successfully execute your program process strategy for project success. Get a demo of WorkOtter and see how we can make your program management effective.
“The Handbook of Program Management: How to Facilitate Project Success with Optimal Program Management, Second Edition” by James T. Brown is a copyrighted work of McGraw-Hill and McGraw-Hill reserves all rights in and to the Content. ©2014 by McGraw-Hill Education. Purchase the book/a> on Amazon.
