Client Management: The Influence of Powerful Questions

I had a wonderful opportunity to be with one of my mentors in three different client settings. I am sure people in project, account, product, and sales setting have gone through the stakeholder management aspects. Whether it was a formal status meeting, casual hallway conversation, informal dinner meeting, or an internal project evaluation meeting, I found it very inspiring to see how my mentor was skillfully weaving these questions to eliminate ambiguity and establish a solid business relationship. 

While I added a few of my own color from account and project management, I felt such a strong reinforcement of these questions that I felt compelled to package these questions for the community at large. So, here goes the list. Feel free to add - focus however on strategic account & project management and not bury with technical aspects of platform and feasibility here!

1. What are your goals and objectives? Are you interested in market expansion, market penetration, or both? What's your timeline? 
2. What are your challenges to meeting these goals and objectives? How would addressing these challenges benefit you and your organization financially?
3. What are the profiles of stakeholders that you are looking at to satisfy with your campaign?
4. What types of population are you planning to target? Why are these targets important to you?
5. What types of channels are you planning to use? What data points do you have to support these channels to effectively reach your population? 
6. How much of your budget are you willing to spend on these channels? What's your exit strategy?
7. How would meeting these goals and overcoming challenges enhance the competitiveness of the product?
8. If you were to meet your goal, what would this mean to you? 
9. If these challenges are not met or goals accomplished, what does this mean to you?
10. What's an example of a successful campaign or meeting? What data points are you looking at to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign or efficiency of the meeting? 
11. What's your communication style? 
12. What's your risk profile? Are you adventurous and creative to try new things? 

Future of Project Management in the Next few years

In the Professional Development Day (PD Day) conducted by Project Management Institute Mass Bay chapter on June 19, 2015, there was a great introductory session with more than 100+ participants representing many industries that broke into numerous tables. One of the questions that all the attendees worked on was the top challenges that are facing the field of project managers in the next 10 years.

Synthesizing the various thoughts from these discussions, the following set of challenges evolved where project managers should equip themselves with more knowledge.

1. Become more business- oriented learning strategic thinking
2. Having to work with remote multinational teams learning the cultural nuances
3. Become more involved with futuristic technologies on just enough automation, delegating even creative tasks to relieve human capacity, and learning new ways of doing things with mobile, service orientation, and security areas
4. Learning to work with multiple tools for both process and analytics bringing focus into application lifecycle management and total cost of ownership
5. Understanding agile framework as much as traditional project management framework learning to know when to apply each or a hybrid form
6. Learning to manage external and internal stakeholders in the business learning to negotiate better
7. Getting better at managing risks in multifaceted areas (PESTLE) besides just SWOT
8. Being more accountable for quality to compete with the agile thinking
9. Promoting project management in organizations much beyond PMP certification
10. Understanding the impact of growing regulatory environments on projects

These thoughts present insightful forecasting of what is to come both in the project managers that face the clients and the account managers (Ryals, 2012) that should exhibit project management thinking. So, the landscapes around the evaluation of project management competency are rising. For instance, the Project Management Institute is looking at PMI Talent Triangle (Know the details, n.d.) incorporating technical project management as integral component to continuing credit requirements. 

Similarly, Computerworld in an independent study (Pratt, 2014) forecasts the growth of project managers as part of IT skills emphasizing project managers to exhibit both business and technical acumen to oversee large enterprise projects, growth of security and compliance skills, demand for skills in the mobile application and device management and increase in the knowledge of big data analysis. 

So, competition is rising! How equipped are we in rising to this challenge stepping out of our comfort zone? One or two years from now if we come to read the same blog, what new skills by training and experience would we have gained?

References

Know the details (n.d.) Project Management Institute. Retrieved  from http://www.pmi.org/certification/ccr-updates/know-the-details.aspx

Pratt, M.K. (2014, Nov 18). 10 hottest IT skills.  Retrieved from http://www.computerworld.com/article/2844020/it-careers/10-hottest-it-skills-for-2015.html

Ryals, L. (2012, July 13). How to succeed at key account management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/07/how-to-succeed-at-key-account/#sthash.0YH3ELKn.dpuf 

Cost of Quality: The increasing value of acceptance testing besides automated testing

There are two prevalent themes in software development in the corporate world: “Zero Quality Errors” and “Doing more with less”. The dominance of both these concepts has critical importance in their implementation.

1. Eliminating the number of testers increases the level of effort on the remaining testers to check every test case as thoroughly as possible introducing errors. The testers that have the accountability to ensure that they don’t release features without signing off are under pressure compromising the quality.
2. Keeping more testing resources also does not guarantee zero quality when the testers don’t keep up with the current trends. The number of communication lines increase with the QA manager, test lead, offshore test coordinators, and testers. This functional hierarchy removes the testers from the developers defeating the self-organized team requirements. Consequently, the requirements dilute and morph leading to management problems as the customer complaints increase, time to market slips, and product reviews decline.

The logical solution is “Automated testing” making the system do testing detecting more defects at earlier points in the development life cycle as well as continuously testing deployed code for production bugs. The solution is logical and practical as it accomplishes doing more work with fewer resources consistently, continuously, and almost effortlessly compared to the needs to have a human present to manually test. 

Does that mean automated testing is a perfect solution where we can enable computer assisted software tools (CAST) to as many testers as possible? The agile engineering practices recommend automated testing but also emphasize acceptance testing where the business owners also are involved in testing. But how far are our people in client-facing roles like product managers, project managers, program managers, and account managers increasing their knowledge of the business domain and related technical tools to test the releases?  How much is the management attuned to this fact?

1. The client facing roles mentioned earlier may question why they should do this testing that the testing department is accountable for? It is a valid question but when buying a car why do you want a test run? Why do we do our own walk-through inspection of the home instead of leaving the work completely to the home inspector? We do this because we are equally responsible for the outcome. As these roles face the client who can claim escaped defects or the features for enhancement, how could these responsibilities have downplayed?
2. Let us face another argument of being busy doing this acceptance testing! When automation is introduced, the developers and testers must write additional lines of code and test scripts to ensure that the automation works according to the 3A principle (Arrange what needs to be tested, Act by developing code to test, and assert by evaluating the outcome against the expected).  This needs more time commitment and learning additional tools where the developers and testers need to immerse themselves to evolve to the expectations of today’s workforce. So, if one group that is busy can increase their competencies, why should not these client facing roles elevate their skill-competency gap instead of claiming the busy life?
3. Another important angle to consider is new functional non-customer value add requirement but a business value-add requirement, such as the heartbeat monitors, exception log checks, and time taken to test checks as part of the automation efforts. None of these requirements are part of the actual product feature a customer sees but are additional scope of work that the business mandates on the execution wings to design, develop, and test. When these are baked into the level of effort or timeline and when customer asks to reduce the time to market, the client facing roles cripple the quality by not standing up for best practices.

If quality were a coin, automation testing and acceptance testing are its two sides. Efforts spent only on one side won’t have the completely desired economic impact.  Automation is a shift in the way the code is developed, tested, deployed, and monitored requiring refined skills. It is an important element in reducing the cost of quality but so is the acceptance testing that requires additional skills. If we fail to recognize and implement both these effectively, then, the efforts spent in automation may be offset by escaped defects due to lack of acceptance testing.  A new breed of client facing roles is therefore on the rise and the management needs to focus on both the automation testing along with acceptance testing.