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Are Your Projects Meeting Expectations?

By Lynn Kelly

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 16Mar2012 Word count: 521 Viewed: 21 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Companies are always challenged to meet the expectations of the consumers. With so much competition and more demanding customers, the new challenge for companies is not just to meet the customer's expectations but to exceed those expectations. In the old days of project management, the primary factors of cost, time, and scope are combined to produce goods and services of the highest quality. Nowadays, quality is not the ultimate goal but it has become a factor, along with cost, time, and scope, and they are combined to produce goods and services to meet customer expectations. In this scenario, it's extremely vital that all the project members are on the same page in regards to expectation management and it's also one of the biggest reasons why Project Vantage can be an indispensable tool for the efficient management of your project.

To understand expectation management on a deeper level, it's necessary to look at the Pyramid of Expectation. Basically, there are four levels of expectation. At the apex of the pyramid, there's Suspense, followed by Surprise, and then, there's Satisfaction, and finally, Sacrifice. In the modern business landscape, a company is not merely a producer of goods and services. It forms a relationship with the customers based on how the company meets their expectations. Other than the goods and services, this bond is also extended to customer service, refund policies, and public relations. At the very least, the company has to ensure that the consumers are satisfied. If the consumers are less than satisfied, then, they will be sacrificed and it means that the company has lost some customers. On the other hand, a company can surprise the consumers by producing goods and services that exceed their expectations and the real big companies only play at the highest level where they create suspense in the consumer experience.

Project management is concerned about risk management, technology management, resources management, business management, and the like. When expectation is incorporated within project management, the project manager can monitor the predictability of expectations as the project progresses. By charting these developments, the project manager is able to make changes to ensure that the outcome of the project meets or exceeds the expectations of the shareholders and the consumers. Project Vantage is excellent for expectation management because it allows the project manager to access critical information about project workload, assignments, and resource allocation in real-time. In this way, the project manager can gauge where the project is heading and introduce changes when any risk emerges.

With the Projects Dashboard, all the statistics and statuses of the project is available in easy-to-digest formats, making it very easy for the manager to make sure that company targets are met. You can get a project breakdown and analyze the schedule progress or budget consumption and there's the PM Perspective Traffic Light which alerts the manager about potential problems. There are also real-time pie charts and graphs for more in-depth analysis. All in all, Project Vantage provides all the necessary tools for a project manager to manage expectations efficiently and effectively.

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