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Successfully Interviewing Your Project Customer and Gathering Project Requirements - Part I - Introduction

October 23, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Communications Management, Project Management Best Practices, Project Stakeholder Management, Role of the Project Manager

Successfully Interviewing Your Project Customer and Gathering Project Requirements - Part I - Introduction (#1 in the series Successfully Interviewing Your Project Customer and Gathering Project Requirements)
By Keith Mathis - PM Expert Live

Project requirements are very important for creating and driving the project forward toward its successful completion. There are many who think there is little or no need to interview the customer. Many project managers are pressured to create a plan and get a team up and going fast with almost no information about what the project is to accomplish. Because of this pressure, the interview process is sometimes overlooked or done in a haphazard manner. The sad reality is that it has become the culture of many organizations to start a project without detailed requirements or a customer interview. To effectively use the steps discussed in this report may require you to reeducate the customer so he or she understands that it is in his or her best interest to participate in the interview with plenty of data and details.

When projects are created with no interview process, you discover that the project deliverables are created without any real foundational information. In some cases, the plan is only a skeleton of what the project is supposed to accomplish. As you interview your customer, do not be surprised that some of your questions have not yet been answered. This is due to evolutionary thinking which takes place in the early stages of a project. In those early stages, one will think of the foundational need of the project or what problem it will solve. Based on this understanding, the customer will create some basic project requirements. However, the customer might not have conducted any real analysis of the situation nor have they looked at how this project will impact internal processes or others within the organization. This is why when you begin asking questions, they discover the need to return to their management team or others and gather more information themselves.

Before we show you how to conduct a detailed requirements gathering interview with your customer, we want to go deeper into the pitfalls of not conducting one. This is used to establish a foundation for the need and to prevent future problems or misunderstandings concerning this action. The requirements gathering interview is not something nice to do; it is a necessity! It is the only way we can plan on increasing our potential of completing the projects with fewer headaches.

Dr. Keith Mathis, founder and CEO of The Mathis Group, specializes in Project Management, Management Leadership, and Marketing training for private businesses and government agencies of all kinds. He offers 33 Project Management courses, is a Project Management Professional, is certified by the Project Management Institute and will customize every training session to your individual company’s needs. The Mathis Group also sponsors www.pmexpertlive.com, which is a powerful project management resource with free reports, podcasts, videos, and a monthly newsletter. He also offers customized management training and coaching on any subject with prolific communication and professionalism.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 and is filed under Communications Management, Project Management Best Practices, Project Stakeholder Management, Role of the Project Manager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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