How to Meet the Customer Expectations

What is meant by success of every project? Delivering the end product to the client.

All projects work hard and deliver the end product, then why do only some projects are always appreciated and some are not? The project is appreciated by the client only when the team meets the expectations of the client. This article will help the teams to deliver the end product along with some useful information so that the expectations of the client are met.

Before discussing further always believe that the Clients feedback contributes the most when success of the project is taken in consideration.

Usually every customer has the following expectations:

1. On-time delivery: A customer expects that the end product is always delivered in time by the Off-shore team. Customer pre-plan his/her schedule, however the priority may change based upon the results delivered by the off-shore team. When the team maintain the time consistency the customer also gets ample time to prioritize his/her work instead of taking last moment decisions.
It is very hard to keep the delivery time always intact with the time scheduled by the customer.However, proper planning and team effort together can make this task easier.

2.Representation of the deliverables: Not only the work you perform should be good, the presentation of your work counts a lot, as all are more interested towards the decisions made by the team.
A status report should containing the following information:
a)The tasks performed by you-gives idea what are functionalities covered.
b)Comparative analysis with the previous build-This tell the graph of the product(Improvement/Worsen)
c)Make a list of all the bugs posted in the current build and identify the module that is most effected(which contains a lot of bugs)-This helps the customer to force the development team to work more on that particular module.
It is the responsibility of the QA to present there views and decisions on a release build so that the customer can finally decide whether to release or not.

3.Metrics: Though we have a bunch of metrics, the customer may not be required all the metrics. Identify the metrics that are required and provide the same. For example: For the release build, if the customer is provided with Test Coverage metric, this will increase the customers confidence level.

4. Mutual Relationship: The relationship will always be in a good health if 'Give and Take' policy is opted. Do not hesitate to work on a n Off day if your customer requests. At the same time, do not hesitate to ask for a compensatory Off when the team requires. Always Giving or Always Taking will pull down the health of the project.

5. Feed Back: A team should always request for Customer feed back in regular intervals. The feed back should be compared with the previous one and necessary steps should be taken by the team to overcome the issues mentioned by the customer.If you have performed extraordinarily and you customer fails to recognize, then identify the reason and try to overcome it.