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Do customer experience management projects present special challenges for project managers?
These projects involve web, mobile, social, and so on -- are these projects unique from a project management standpoint?
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3 Answers
the project management activities are not unique. The cultural and change management aspects of these efforts are unique. the more clear the business objective, the greater the probability of success.
I agree with Daniel to his point that the change management aspect of CEM projects poses the biggest challenge. My reasoning is the fact that end user adoption is difficult enough when the end user is an employee who can access a local server for change documentation. You add layers of complexity to the task of providing training content through multiple outlets such as mobile and social for external users. The keys to success for a project like this is having a well defined blueprint for all of the business processes affected by the change event along with a solution that can centrally distribute the necessary content to the end users to maximize adoption. My two pennies.
Thanks,
Joe
Project managers, and internal project/IT staff in general, are often not prepared for a unique characteristic of customer experience projects: customers often want things that don't make perfect project or design sense; they often want systems that are ridiculously easy to use but don't bring a requisite degree of facility to their part of the equation; they often respond illogically to any perceived lack or complexity in systems they are asked to use... an so on.
This creates a requirements universe that traditional system planning and development techniques were not designed to address. The response of project, especially IT, groups was for a long time; "we'll do it right and they will use it, period." While this never worked well, it could get by in an earlier, less automated customer-provider period. That is gone now and what the customer wants, no matter how illogical it may seem, is often the primary and always an important determiner of how systems must be architected and operated; especially where the customer has alternatives if he or she is not satisfied with the experience.
As you might imagine, some organizations do well at this and others poorly. Perhaps the most important difference between the two is the degree to which a focus on the customer universe is built into the project at the outset and maintained throughout. That may sound so easy that it goes without saying, but it is in fact quite difficult especially where the project team is heavily influenced by tradtional IT personnel and techniques.
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