项目管理 - 客户参与

去年有个项目不成功，其中一个原因就是客户的参与程度不够，导致最后的交付成果与客户期望有很大差距。而最近在进行的一个项目，至少从客户期望的角度来说会比较顺利。因为每周的build客户都有专人测试，提出反馈意见，进而可以对接下来的任务优先级、范围等进行及时调整。而且客户会较早的发现问题，使项目的进行一直沿着其期望的方向。

share a good article on this topic from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa699451.aspx

Make the Customer Your Ally

Your customers can be extremely diverse, having very different backgrounds and expectations on how custom software development is performed. Or you might be lucky and have only internal customers who are intimate with your software-development process. Regardless, your work will be remembered by your ability to hold to your word of when what you say will be delivered is delivered.

What must be acknowledged is that no matter the quality of the technical solution that you produce, success will be measured by how you meet the expectations of your customers. The process that you use to create custom solutions should actively engage the decision makers who will be passing judgment on whether or not the outcome is successful. Your customers should never be surprised or embarrassed. They can be surprised because the feature that they thought was going to be developed was not developed, or a deliverable was late and they did not know about it ahead of time. They can be embarrassed because promises that they made were broken, due to a feature not being delivered when it was supposed to be delivered.

Custom software development can take on a life of its own after the project has begun. It is well known that it is quite impossible to detail every requirement of each feature before any code is cut. Gone are the days in which weeks (or even months) are spent on requirements documentation that quickly becomes obsolete during the project. The software industry has been alive for a long time now, and your customers are much wiser. The concept that the features mature as the project progresses is not foreign, and your customer will expect you to be able to react to change during the project. Keeping the customer engaged and part of the decision-making process for these changes is what must be done.

Everyone knows that change will occur during the building of a custom solution, new features will be born, and priorities will change. Embracing this fluidity and immersing your customers in it allows everyone to be on the same page. When your customers want a new feature, it will be placed on a feature backlog that is to be built. A priority will be assigned to it and an acknowledgement made by everyone that without a change in scope or timeline, other features will not be developed in the final deliverable. By allowing your customers to change priorities during the project and helping them understand the ramifications of performing that action, they become part of the solution and will become your ally.

Your customers will feel enabled by being able to affect the project. They should be kept engaged with status meetings as frequently as you can (for example, twice a week) in order for them have a constant pulse on the project, and not by weekly status reports that no one ever reads. If they are part of the creation process, and not just there to receive the deliverable at the end of a sprint, your customers will already know what will be delivered to them before they see it and they can actively set expectations on their end. The risk for performing rework to appease a customer is significantly reduced, you complete the project when you said that you would, and your project team can be released on schedule to work on another project. Your customers will ask you back for repeat business and will be a reference for new customers.

It can be perceived that what is being endorsed here is a recipe for a never-ending project, which could not be further from the truth. The goal of the process is to guide the airplane that is your project to a scheduled landing in one piece, entirely intact, and as close to as what the customer wanted. The fact that some details might be missing from the final product will have been a decision to which your customer has already agreed.