It might sound strange to many that a project is a client / customer journey. Projects are client driven for intent and project manager drives the intent through the project to achieve the defined outcome of that intent.

  • It is a journey of touch points that we take a client through.
  • It is journey of points, points of customer pain.
  • A journey which are opportunities for an enhanced customer / client experience.

Every project is a customer journey you are taking a client through and we should design the journey so that every touch-points you engage the client in and the team ensures a positive experience. We should craft a journey that at the end of the project journey the client is left with a positive emotion, observation or reaction as a result of each engagement throughout the life-cycle of the project.

Brian Solis indicates in his book “X: The Experience when Business Meets Design on the importance of experience design and the role it will play in business today and it is imperative to go beyond focusing on building products and services if you’re looking to create the most valuable relationships with customers.

A project is no different from building products and services when it comes to creating valuable relationship with our project clients. Valuable relationship with clients can be achieved by starting to understand that Client Experience – Customer Experience defines success today in the digital economy we are in where every organisation is undergoing a digital transformation.

The changes of the digital economy have outpaced the ability of organisations to exist “as is” and its ability to succeed. The digital economy and the resultant digital transformation of organisations has also changed our client’s expectation on project delivery. The customer experience that their customers expect from these organisations has been flipped over to us who deliver the projects of these organisations. If we already have not, we have to examine our project delivery and determine if our project delivery methodology meets the litmus test of the digital economy of delivering “enhanced customer experience”

There is school of thought in the project management world that if you mind the store - keep track of the process and call regular progress meetings and minute it, that the project will get delivered. “It can be very easy to fall into the trap of believing that process is everything in project management “Says Steve McGuckin, global property managing director for consultancy Turner & Townsend.

It is very easy to be lost in maintaining the process and loosing sight of client satisfaction. Dr. Alan Beyerchen –Ohio State University has this to say: “We … erect institutions, and develop organizations to yield linear responses and predictable behavior, and ultimately to achieve the social goal of control.”  The industrial economy metrics of efficiency and control and less about adaptability has got it deep sea burial and we are into a digital globalized economy where the criteria for customer service – client experience has been redefined and the metrics of success is different.

A sign on the wall of the American Greetings Austin headquarters read:

“Somewhere along the way, in the race to get ahead, we lost something important, let’s go back and find it.”

In our project journey our focus on defining process and their associated metrics and keeping eye on the milestones, we have lost “customer satisfaction” along the way. Let’s go back and reclaim it. We have lost the essence of providing customer satisfaction, as we have been reacting to the journeys that clients themselves devise - instead let’s shape their paths, leading not following, so we can determine the final outcome of a project. The ability to shape and or craft the journey is central to ensuring a positive and stratifying client experience.

The key to project success is enhancing client experience. Enhance client experience is to make “finding your customers’ point of thirst your competitive advantage”. The client experience has to address the customers' pain points—whether they can articulate them or not.

Our role as project manager is to manage the end-to end points of the journey while coordinating / managing the work of an ecosystem that consist of consultants, engineers and contractors, builders, vendors and suppliers. This journey can be described as a sequence of interactions and decisions that impact the defined outcome of the project and positively contribute towards optimizing the cumulative, end-to-end journey.

One size does not fit all. Every customer is different and using information about a customer — either based on past interactions or collected from external sources - to customize the journey goes a long way to create a positive client experience in projects. We can start by cataloguing each interaction with a customer across the cumulative, end-to-end journey and every touch point to map out the most common journeys.

Client Experience matters.

To be truly experience driven, we must continue to explore ways to wire our projects differently. Every experience is an opportunity to win or lose a client. These journeys need to be actively managed, measured, and nurtured.

How well project managers are able to do that will dictate how successful they are in making customer journeys a competitive advantage.

I would love to hear your experience on project journeys as an opportunity to enhance client experience

Philip Thomas - Optimizing Project Delivery Services; Workplace Experience Strategist; Design & Circular Thinking; Evangelist for disrupting the AEC Industry.

I do write on Enhancing Client Experience; Project Management; Design Thinking and Circular Thanking; The Untethered Workplace – The Future of Work & the Workplace of the Future and on Disrupting the AEC industry.

To read more on these subject go to our Blog page on our website: www.optumplus.com