Customer Experience Domination #5

Lesson #5: Managing Your Customer Experience Project

• In lesson #1, we discussed the steps that are necessary to develop a compelling customer experience strategy that can deliver meaningful and lasting results.
• In lesson #2, we showed you how to translate those ideas into a customer experience action plan.
• In lesson #3, we taught you how to look for customer experience opportunities in your business.
• In lesson #4, we showed you how to develop the customer experience business case.
• In this lesson, we’ll teach you the basics of customer experience project management.

As a business professional, you know that getting results requires vision, discipline, and paying attention to details. Improving your customer experience is no different. Realizing the significant benefits associated with customer experience domination requires sound project management fundamentals.

Project management may not be sexy, exciting, or inspirational, but it is a discipline that when executed effectively can make all the difference between success and failure. I’ve seen far too many companies throw millions of dollars down the drain due to the lack of project management discipline. Customer experience projects are no different; to get the results you desire you will need to master the fundamentals of project management.

In this lesson, I will share with you the basic elements of project management discipline. Incorporate these elements into your customer experience project and you will be well on your way to achieving customer experience domination.

Step 1: Create the Project Workplan

The key management tool for any project is the project workplan. The workplan is a comprehensive plan that identifies the activities that will be conducted over the course of the project and identifies the sequence, timing, interdependencies, and individuals responsible for each activity or task. The workplan should represent the scope of work to be conducted as part of the project.

A common tool for defining, modeling and managing the project workplan is the Gantt chart, which is a graphical representation of the tasks, interdependencies, responsible parties, and progress over time. Additional methods include the PERT chart (Program Evolution Review Technique) and the Critical Path Method (CPM), both of which depict the tasks and interdependencies as a network model.

There are numerous commercially available workplan tools that support the various planning methods. We recommend using one of the available tools to create and manage your project workplan. Perhaps the mostly widely used workplan tool is Microsoft Project. However, an initial project workplan can also be created using simple spreadsheet or flowcharting tools, although they will not provide the built-in project reporting and analysis capabilities that come with most tools.

Get started on your workplan by creating a work breakdown structure (WBS) for your project. The work breakdown structure represents a hierarchical structure for the phases, steps, activities and tasks that make up the project. If you’d like more information on project management techniques, you can get additional resources at the Project Management Institute.

How to Avoid the Top 5 Customer Experience Project Pitfalls

Customer Experience differentiation can generate significant benefits for any company. Unfortunately, many companies fall victim to a common set of customer experience pitfalls and fail to capitalize on their customer experience potential. Successful companies overcome these project pitfalls and are far more likely to realize meaningful and lasting results from their customer experience projects. In our report, 'How to Overcome the Top 5 Customer Experience Project Pifalls', we've assembled the top 5 mistakes that companies make when taking on a customer experience project. We clearly explain each potential pitfall and provide pragmatic advice that will help you to overcome these customer experience project pitfalls. Get your copy today and take a step closer to customer experience domination

Once you define the basic phases, steps, and activities of your workplan, you will need to estimate how long each element will take to complete. Estimating an appropriate timeline for your project can be the most vexing part of the process; despite the best intentions and a heavy dose of scientific forecasting, it seems that often the intangibles will ultimately dictate the project timeline. As a result, it’s often best to define the timeline as a range, rather than an absolute number of weeks or months.

There are numerous methods for trying to evaluate how long you should expect your project to take. A top-down estimation makes an ‘educated guess’ as to how long the project should take. The underlying steps, activities, and tasks are then scheduled to fit into the timeline. If the activities won’t fit the timeline either the scope or timeline is modified and the process is repeated. This forecast accuracy of this method can be poor, but the ability to quickly generate a high-level timeline estimate makes it a good method for preliminary planning.

A bottom-up estimation looks at the individual underlying tasks, resources and interdependencies that, when taken together, add-up to the total estimated project duration. The bottoms-up method requires that the vast majority of project attributes are well defined and understood. Developing the bottoms up method can be tedious and often results in a timeline estimate that far exceeds original estimates. This method, however, results in a more detailed and fact based forecast that is more accurate than the top-down method. However, developing the bottom-up model can be time consuming and difficult.

Both methods have their flaws. In fact, some professional project managers have adopted an informal rule to double any original project timeline estimate to account for the various intangible factors that inevitably affect any project. Needless to say, take your timeline estimate for what it is – an estimate.

In any case, your own project scope, approach and team culture will determine the timeline that is right for you. As a general rule you should try to avoid estimating a project timeline longer than 12 months in duration. Projects that span longer than a year are prone to changes in scope, goals, requirements, personnel, and funding. In short, the longer your project horizon, the less likely it is that you will realize your original project goals and objects.

A preferred approach is to break your overall project into digestible phases that can be completed within three to six months. By doing so, you will have interim project successes and realize potential benefits along the way, if appropriate. Each subsequent phase can then be defined with the most current information. As a result, project phases are more likely to be completed on time and on budget, which makes everyone happy.

Step 2: Plan for Change

Improving your customer experience capabilities will undoubtedly require a fair amount of things to change in your company: responsibility changes, process changes, technology changes, and behavioral changes. Getting there won’t happen by accident. It also won’t happen if you wait until after your project is nearly complete to try and force the new capabilities onto your unknowing, and potentially unwilling, employees. That’s where change leadership comes into play.

Change Leadership is a discipline that focuses on managing the impacts that new business capabilities may have on your organization, and doing it in a manner to ensure that the change takes place in an orderly, yet effective, fashion. We use the term ‘change leadership’ rather than ‘change management’ because effective change occurs when someone is leading, not pushing. Leading means getting people to buy-in to the new concept, it means making it personal for each individual, and it means motivating and/or creating incentives for people to adopt the new capabilities or roles.

Change leadership is not about buying t-shirts or coffee mugs with the project name on them. Change leadership is a combination of effective communications, education & training, and organizational alignment. Before you start your project, make sure that you have a comprehensive plan to address each of these important aspects of change leadership:

1. Assess Change Readiness. Conduct an assessment of your company’s culture and appetite for change. Typically, an organization’s change readiness can be assessed through a formal survey that measures the pace of historical change, the stakeholder’s willingness of change, and the rate of adoption of change. These factors are then evaluated to determine the overall complexity of the change management effort and provide an important input into the communication, training, and organizational alignment planning efforts.
2. Develop a Communication Plan: Develop a communication plan that will identify the method, style and timing of how you will communicate key project messages and accomplishments. This will include identifying the different audiences and potentially different communication plans for each audience. For example, how and when you communicate to your employees will be different than how you communicate to your executive sponsors.
3. Develop a Training Plan: Develop an initial plan up-front for how you will formally train and support your employees. This may include a combination of classroom, hands-on, and self-service models depending on the nature of change you are planning.
4. Develop an Organizational Alignment Plan: Develop a plan to make sure that your entire organization is aligned with the project. That includes the top executives and executive sponsors, as well as the individuals on the project team.
   

Step 3: Assemble the Project Team

It seems that you can’t pick up a business book today without finding a common piece of advice: Get good people. Assembling the right people for your project team should follow that sage advice. Getting the right people will improve your project’s efficiency, effectiveness, and overall chances for success.

But before you can assemble your team, you should define the team structure, roles, and responsibilities that will be required for your project. These elements will help to guide you in finding the right person for the right role on your project team.

Project team structures can come in just about any shape or size. The trick is to create a structure that will work most effectively for your company and project.

The roles and associated responsibilities for your project team should be well defined and understood. Although not every role will be required for every project, consider each one carefully to determine how well it fits your situation. We’ve provided a few of the more critical roles & responsibilities to help you to get started:

• Steering Committee: The role of the steering committee is to provide guidance and advice to the project and serve as a conduit for communicating project status to executive stakeholders. Effective steering committees are actively, not passively, involved in the project and often take on the ultimate responsibility of the project’s funding, scope, and results. The steering committee should be comprised of individuals with the authority and responsibility to make critical decisions for the project. Its members should be cross-functional in nature that includes the executive sponsor, subject matter experts (customer relationship management, customer service, account management), functional representatives (finance, operations, human resources, marketing, information technology, research & development), and stakeholder representatives (customer liaisons, field personnel, vendors, employees).
• Executive Sponsor: The role of the executive sponsor is to serve as the primary individual that is responsible for the project’s outcome. This individual should have enough authority in the company to help resolve key issues and influence key stakeholders. The executive sponsor is responsible for organizing and leading the steering committee meetings.
• Stakeholders: The role of the stakeholders is to effectively represent the interests and insights of their respective area of responsibility. Stakeholders should represent the area of the business that is affected by the project. For example, a call center consolidation project should include stakeholders that represent the customer service agents that will be affected. The stakeholders should be involved throughout the project to take them on the journey rather than simply surprising them with the final solution at the end of the project.
• Project Manager: The role of the project manager is to provide the day-to-day direction and management of the project. This includes the day-to-day coordination and collaboration with the project team, as well as the status reporting and communication that is required to keep the steering committee, executive sponsor, and advisors up to date with the project. The project manager is responsible for establishing and managing the project management governance including risk, issue, workplan, team, and business case management procedures.
  

You can get a comprehensive list of customer experience project roles & responsibilities in our Customer Experience Field Guide titled ‘How to Make your Customers Sing!’

As you create your project team structure and begin to assign individuals to specific roles, there are several factors that you should consider:

• Full time versus part time: Consider whether each role requires full or part time participation. In most cases, full time participation is preferred. If full time participation is not feasible or possible, make sure that you plan for the potential productivity drain that may result of only part time participation. Some project managers use a rule of 50% for part time resources; plan for part time resource to be productive for only half of their participation rate. For example, a resource that participates only 60% of their time realizes 30% productivity over the course of the project.
• Cross-functional representation: If your project will affect multiple functions and/or stakeholders in your company, make sure that your project team reflects the cross-functional nature of the project.
• Double-Hatting: In some cases, a single individual may be able to take responsibility for multiple roles. This practice is called double-hatting; an individual wears a different ‘hat’ for each role they are filling. For example, one individual may serve in the role of both training and communication specialist.
• Authority: As you assemble your project team, make sure that the collective team possesses the appropriate level of authority to resolve issues and make important project decisions. A project team without the appropriate authority often gets bogged down while waiting for key decisions to be made by outside parties.
• Co-location: If your project team members come from multiple locations or departments, it is important to create a single, common project team environment where they can work together. Despite advances in e-mail, messaging, and audio and video conferencing, the value of having your team co-located in the same room can be significant; issues are identified and resolved more quickly, project communication is more effective, and key design considerations can be discussed, debated, and resolved more efficiently.
• Collaborate with Vendors: If your project team consists of external consultants or contractors, make sure that you develop a healthy relationship with them. Make sure that their goals and incentives are aligned with the project and that they blend seamlessly into the project team environment. Avoid the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset that can creep into a mixed team environment; a situation that can breed mistrust and other bad behaviors.
• Time Keeping: Keeping track of what each project team member is working on requires an effective time keeping mechanism. In an environment where project hours count against the project budget, effective timekeeping is critical. Establish your project’s clear time keeping policies and procedures up front.
  

Step 4: Assemble the Project Management Plan

Effective project management requires a lot of discipline to track activities, manage budget expenditures, resolve issues, mitigate risks, and keep everyone informed and happy. But don’t let the tools manage you.

Too often, project managers get inundated with the administrative aspects of project management to the point that the project goals get lost in the flurry of paperwork. Don’t over administer. Instead, find a balance that maintains enough discipline for your situation while letting the project team to move forward with the task at hand – delivering the project.

The most effective project managers find a way to balance the administrative nature of project management with the creative energy that is generated by the project team. That balance can be achieved by following some project management best practices:

1. Make the Destination Clear: The destination for any project should be clearly defined, measurable, and easily understood. At project inception, clearly define the factors that prompted you to take the journey, the tangible results you seek to achieve and how you will measure them, and the course and methods that you plan to use to get you there.
2. Be Persistent: Stay focused on the destination and eliminate any unnecessary distractions by being relentless on achieving the project goals, measuring progress against key performance indicators, and resolving issues quickly.
3. Have a Plan: Winging it rarely works – so have a work plan. A work plan is a detailed representation of the overall project approach and should be defined with enough detail to provide any team member with a clear understanding of the project, where things stand, and who’s doing what.
4. Assemble a Great Team: The value of having great people around you in business has been a proven success factor. Assemble a great team of people for your project, get them committed to the project, and empower the team to collaborate to achieve dramatic results.
5. Measure Progress & Results: You get what you measure. So make sure that you measure the important attributes of your project such as cost and benefits, status, and quality.
6. Kill Issues Dead: Project issues can be a pesky thing. Make sure that you have a mechanism in place to identify and resolve issues quickly and completely.
7. Manage the Change: Change won’t happen by itself. Have a plan and pay close attention to who, how and when change will occur.
   

Take these tips into consideration as you assemble the major project management deliverables into a comprehensive Project Management Plan. The Project Management Plan (PMP) will serve as the master plan for your customer experience project.

Step 5: Kick Off Your Project

You are now ready to start your project. In order to do so, you need to make sure that you have your entire team on board with where you are going (goal), how you are going to get there (approach), and why you’re doing it (business case).

Start by having a project kick-off meeting to communicate and discuss all aspects of the projects with all project stakeholders: Executive sponsors, project team members, contractors, vendors, employees, and customers, as appropriate.

The project kick-off not only serves as an important management meeting to mobilize the troops, it also can serve as the initial change leadership communication to set expectations for the journey. Although the project is just beginning, the kick-off meeting can be a critical event that sets the stage and demonstrates management’s commitment to the effort. It’s a time to rally the team, generate excitement, and answer any questions:

1. Paint the Big Picture: When you kick-off your project, you need to provide an overview of what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going to get there. The Customer Experience 'Made Clear' Process Maps are excellent tools for helping get everyone to understand the business issues being addressed and to explain the expected outcome. The Customer Experience Roadmap serves as a visual representation of the project approach including the sequence and timing of when certain activities will occur. Both documents should be used during the project kick-off, and displayed as a reminder throughout the project of what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going to get there.
2. Get Dirty: The kick-off meeting should also be about getting into the details. Discuss the specific elements of the project work plan, business case, and status reporting processes. The kick-off meeting should provide the appropriate details to make everyone comfortable with how the project will be managed going forward.
3. Create Excitement: Perhaps most importantly, create some excitement. In many cases, the project team is taking on additional responsibilities over and above their day-to-day jobs. So make it worth their while. Generate an excitement and make sure that everyone is on board. If appropriate, establish team or individual incentives for participating and completing the project so people can translate what’s in it for them.
   

That wraps up Lesson #5. You are now one step closer to customer experience domination. To recap our lesson, the three steps that we covered included:

1. Create the Project Workplan
2. Plan for Change
3. Assemble the Project Team
4. Assemble the Project Management Plan
5. Kick Off Your Project

Stay tuned for Lesson #6, where we’ll discuss specific examples of how to improve your customer experience.