• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Getting Customer Representation

Question 8: Do you have experienced and effective user representation?

Good Practice: An experienced user representative should be appointed to work with the project manager. The user representative will lead the user group and be responsible for all business information for the project.

It is essential to keep the process user-driven, and ultimate project ownership must rest with the business. You must ensure you have enough user resources to drive the project forward. If this is not available, you should stop the project. Follow a no surprise approach with the user group. This approach requires regular communication and telling it like it is.

Common Mistakes

• Insufficient user resources made available.
• User representative made available part-time.
• Underestimating the amount of user information needed during all stages of the project.
• Business information ending with a User Requirements Specification.

Note: As the project moves into the design, development and user pilot stages, considerable and continuing business information is needed to define requirements at a lower level of detail and to answer the many questions that arise.

Warning Sign: When users are not willing to participate in the project team.