Wednesday, December 30, 2009

SharePoint Projects and Your Client….. Change and Conflicts

Whenever we start a new SharePoint project the technical team always has concerns about getting the right requirements from the client and get back to offices in order to kick off development.


What always technical team concerned with, is to get final and confirmed requirements to do not replicate any efforts, but unfortunately always technical team are facing this issue again and again, and in some cases the project is almost closed and still new requirements and changes are being requested.

Management team is worried about time and scope for the project; always they are trying to keep within scope with minimal time needed.

All above still not causing any problems, problems appear whenever management team tries to cut time and cost at the expense of technical standards and overall quality for the solution.

At this stage, and whenever the client start to feel this, he will try to refuse the new technology that will take place and you will face very hard obstacles to get any requirements and the relationship between the client and the software vendor begin to appear as a type of enmity.

Management team should always consider that whenever you are going to rollout a new SharePoint solution to the client, you are trying to Change something in their day-to-day environment. So if the software vendor did not treat the relationship with his client as Partnership relation and try to apply this new SharePoint project hand in hand, the client will refuse the new technology and Conflicts will start to appear on the surface.

And even if the client accepted it for the time being, they are not going to adopt your new technology for the future, then its just a time matter until they start to look for another new technology, and sure software vendor will lose this account.

What I mean that you have to consider the Change and Conflicts in your project plans for SharePoint projects; as SharePoint solutions always affect and change the way employees are using to achieve their daily work.

I think that we are missing the Partnership relation dealing with clients, really its so critical right here to spend some much more time to build this relation, and give the client the feeling that you are coming for his convenience and hand in hand this new technology will be a successful story for both sides.

1 comment:

  1. It's all about Relationships, Hamza. In my consulting work at http://www.spsworkflow.com, we, of necessity, need to build relationships with the business to determine the business process needs well in advance of deploying a workflow system. We use software that provides for rapid application development, so we can iteratively express the system visually to them (as well as the process using the design tool), and get their BUY-IN. This is the critical component to the relationship building, and one that assures a successful adoption on the backend.

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