7 Principle #4: Customer needs drive the solution
Voice of the customer; definition, design and scope; requirements and boundaries
As in so many aspects of business and government, customers are at the heart of successful projects. In this case, customers can mean commercial customers, but also might mean internal customers, citizens and users of the project’s results and benefits at large.
Phil Driver summarizes what organizations do in the following terms: ‘Organizations create assets (products, services and infrastructure) and enable customers and citizens to use these assets to create benefits (outcomes) for themselves and others.’1
If customers and citizens (the users in Phil’s definition) are the ones who realize the benefits of a project, it follows that unless your project is driven by their needs, it is on a hiding to nothing. How many IT projects have failed because the users simply ignore the new system?
Understanding and agreeing what the project will consist of and deliver is one of the raisons d’être of project management. Different organizations use different terms to describe this (for example, scope, or specifications, detailed requirements, design and functionality). The scope is the most important element in making an accurate estimation of the cost, duration, plan and benefits of the project.
Depending on the type of project, defining the scope in the early stages may range from the straightforward to the impossible and anything in between. Projects that deliver tangible outcomes, using existing construction or engineering, may be relatively straightforward; although even this may be subject to change, particularly if the project is looking forward some time into the future There are other projects, however, in which the scope will be impossible to determine at the beginning (for example, a digital transformation initiative). Therefore, duration and costs estimated at the beginning of the project will be largely inaccurate, sometimes by a factor of five or more. Basically, if the project only has a vague scope, the time and cost estimated on that basis will be utterly wrong.
The defence dilemma
Between 1997 and 2009, the UK Ministry of Defence was heavily criticized for its approach to commissioning new armoured vehicles. Over that period, it only managed to deliver two out of the eight new vehicle projects it commissioned. Indeed, between 1998 and 2010 it managed to spend £1.1 billion without delivering its principal armoured vehicles. The ministry struggled to develop an approach to designing a project scope that was able to reflect the fact that, rather than commissioning the vehicles of today, they needed to commission vehicles for the future.
Complex requirements have been set which rely on technological advances to achieve a qualitative advantage over the most demanding potential adversaries. However, for vehicles procured using the standard acquisition process there has not been an effective means to assess the costs, risks and amount of equipment needed to meet these requirements in the early stages. These demanding requirements often reduce the scope to maximise competition which in turn can lead to cost increases, delays to the introduction of equipment into service and reductions to the numbers of vehicles bought to stay within budgets.2
The other common challenge is that even if the scope has been well defined at the beginning of the project, there is a good chance that it will change during the life cycle of the project (also known as ‘scope creep’). This will again impact the duration, cost, plans and benefits of the project. The more the scope changes (i.e. in terms of design, requirements, functionality, features and characteristics), the more challenging it is to deliver the project successfully and according to the initial plan.
The clue should be in the name
The purchase of 60 buses at a cost of nearly $750,000 for the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa in 2009 was part of a project to create what the project called ‘an Integrated Public Transport System’.
Unfortunately, problems with the scope and the design of the system resulted in bus lanes that were impractical, zebra crossings that obstructed traffic flow, and design flaws that represented a danger to users of the system. The buses themselves were too large for the roadway and were delivered with the access doors on the wrong side. Following a short period during the 2010 South African World Cup, the buses have been parked up and never used.3
Inadequate consultation, poor requirements planning and a scope that was clearly unfit for purpose have resulted in a system that could not be less integrated if you tried.
Moving a national icon
The development of a new Broadcasting Centre for the BBC was always going to be challenging. Contractors faced complex challenges during the construction phase due to the site location in a busy, residential and constricted area; the underground tube lines; and the Grade II listed status of the building.
The original Art Deco Broadcasting House was designed by George Val Myer. The building has nine floors above the ground and three floors below. With Portland stone surface, the façade and foyer are designed with sculptures carved by Eric Gill. The structure was extended in 1961 and 1995.
The redeveloped Broadcasting House has three buildings linked together around a public courtyard. The new extension building is a 10-floor structure with three basement levels. The curved entrance of the extended building has a glass front and the roof is of a gull-wing shape. It used similar materials to those of the existing building such as Portland stone and glass-cladding. A Jaume Plensa memorial sculpture is installed on the rooftop.
The curved façade and neighbouring buildings have been designed with a night-time lighting scheme. It creates a unified composition with the neighbouring buildings such as John Nash’s All Souls Church. Public spaces for the staff are arranged at the central part of the complex with walkways, break-out areas, education and exhibition spaces, shops, food outlets and a theatre.4
The National Audit Office verdict on the project highlighted the shortcomings of the initial scope.
Phase 1 of the Broadcasting House project ran into serious difficulties. It is a complex project with significant risks, but the full scope of the project was not defined clearly at the outset, and weak governance and poor change control processes contributed to severe delays and increased costs. In 2004, the BBC improved the governance of the project, making significant changes to the management of the remaining stages, and the BBC Governors commissioned consultants to conduct a review of these changes in 2006.5
The BBC story highlights the importance of correctly identifying the customer need before you start, and building an accurate set of requirements and a project scope to match. Get these initial elements wrong and you are likely to struggle with change and governance. And it’s also likely to impact your contractors, which will increase the costs and lengthen the schedule, if it doesn’t also introduce the risk of contract disputes.
How to put Principle #4 into practice
At the beginning of the project, gather the main stakeholders and key contributors together to define and agree to the scope, in as detailed a manner as possible. Don’t be afraid of taking some extra days to address major uncertainties. A delay of one week during the scoping phase can save significant time later. If the uncertainty leads to a change during the implementation, it will probably lead to a longer delay, and perhaps derail the whole project.
‘I don’t want to build a game, I want to build a universe.’ Chris Roberts is the driving force behind Star Citizen, a crowd-funded, multiplayer, online game. The scale of the project is breathtaking, with nearly $200 million in funding. This is the ultimate project, developed on the basis of customer needs.
The project has two million backers – essentially the future customers. Pledging to the project is voluntary and there are no legal obligations for the backers, which means the project team need to do as much as they can to make the audience happy; using weekly release reports on work done, show casts, beta-versions for their customers to try.
Most projects don’t have that level of intimate connection between investors and customers, nor would they want to, but any project could learn from the engagement activity, which serves to build the user base and to validate the work that is being done.6
Principle #4 highlights the importance of putting your customers front and centre of the project and how you manage it. Here are some tools to use, to get you started.
Use the BOSCARD method
This was created in the 1980s by Cap Gemini to help define the scope and requirements of projects. The BOSCARD framework allows you to frame the project in a way that is transparent to all and to set the parameters for ‘who does what and why’. The framework consists of the following seven questions.
1 Background – what is the background of the project?
Describe the relevant facts to show an understanding of the environment, political, business and other contexts in which the project will be carried out.
2 Objective – what are the key objectives?
State the goals of the project and demonstrate an understanding of its business rationale (the ‘why’).
3 Scope – what is the solution the project will implement?
Describe what the project will develop and break its various stages down into milestones. Describe the resources that will be made available and the corresponding external partners, if applicable.
4 Constraints – what are the key constraints to deliver the project successfully?
Describe the key challenges and blocking factors to be addressed in planning the project.
5 Assumptions – what are the main assumptions made?
State the key hypothesis that has been used to define the project rationale, objectives, plan and budget. If assumptions change later, it might justify a renegotiation of the project.
6 Risks – what are the risks that could make the project fail?
List the risks that may materialize and affect the realization of the objectives of the project. Also, list any risks that could have an impact on the timeline and finances (such as tax and other transaction costs).
7 Deliverables – what are the desired outcomes of the project?
Describe the key elements that will be produced by the project, and how they connect to each other and to the project objectives.
By addressing each area, you can be clear on what is expected to be done and not done, and have an upfront discussion on the boundaries of the project with the executive sponsor and key stakeholders.
Employ user-centred design
This is a concept that introduces agile methods for defining and building the project scope. It has grown out of the software development industry and has now become established as a means of understanding customer needs and placing them at the heart of how a project is run and the shape of the product, service, building or (increasingly) government policy.
The key element in many such cases is the user journey (or the patient or citizen experience), which describes the timeline for the customer’s interaction with whatever is the output of the project, along with the decisions the customer makes on the way, the experiences the customer has and the outcome of the interaction.
The reason why user-centred design is so important to projects is because many depend on user behaviour to achieve the benefits and their commercial aims. Let’s take the German Energiewende as an example (see Chapter 3). Ultimately the project is designed to change the way German citizens (and, by extension, citizens in the wider world) perceive and consume energy.
For some projects, particularly those associated with technology – which, increasingly, is the majority of projects for the consumer – the pace of change adds a considerable element of complexity to the design. The designers and then those delivering the project are working with emerging technology for which consumer behaviour may not yet be fully understood.
One design agency describes the user experience associated with a new challenger bank (challenger banks in the UK are new, startup consumer banking services that ‘challenge’ the handful of established and monolithic banks that control 90 per cent of the market) in their blog.7
If we are talking about digital banking disruption in the near future, how will it work? I believe, challenger banks, as a delightful banking customer experience providers, will be based on 10 emerging digital banking trends that you may already know.
1 Blockchain
2 Gamification
3 Nudge theory
4 Robo advising
5 Voice processing
6 Biometrics
7 Social integration
8 Personalization
9 Big data
10 Open API and clouds
Running a project to establish a new challenger banking service therefore requires the project team to understand how customers will interact with some technologies of which the customer is as yet still unaware.