Cultivating a Customer Culture

Project leaders must ensure the entire team prioritizes the needs of the customer.

Project success today means much more than meeting milestones and maintaining a budget. An added
focus on factors like customer satisfaction can make the difference between a project that simply checks
the boxes—and one that truly adds value.

That means it’s up to project leaders to foster a customer culture, ensuring the team continuously keeps
the needs of its customers and stakeholders front and center.

“Customer culture is the way in which an organization treats both its customers and its employees who
directly serve those customers,” says Alison Munro, PMP, a project manager for the city of Vaughan in
Ontario, Canada. “A high-functioning customer culture is one in which the focus is always on the needs of
all stakeholders.”

A Team Effort

A customer culture shouldn’t be the concern of just project leaders, however. While the project manager
and other team leadership may be responsible for setting expectations, a customer culture needs to be
practiced by the entire team, Munro says. And it must be prioritized from the beginning.

“Very early in the project, the team should discuss what high-functioning customer culture looks like, what
performance level is expected and what behaviors that will include,” she says. Project managers can help
reinforce these behaviors by pointing out to the entire team examples of well-executed customer culture,
such as responding promptly to client requests. Equally important, project leaders can put a stop to poor
customer culture—such as not following established lines of communication—through one-on-one
conversations with team members.

Project managers should then continually reinforce the voice of the customer throughout the project life
cycle, starting with the planning process, says Ruth Anne Guerrero, MBA, PMP, president, Ruth Anne
Guerrero Project Management Consulting LLC, Ambler, Pennsylvania, USA. “If possible, engage a cross-
section of customers in the planning and design processes so that the team can hear customer feedback
firsthand and make adjustments accordingly,” Guerrero says. “Project managers should plan for this level
of customer engagement and help the project team to listen and respond to customer needs and desires.”

As the project continues, Guerrero recommends consulting customers to ensure that their requirements
are captured in a clear manner and that what is being delivered will satisfy those requirements. “Whether
it’s having these customers embedded in a requirements gathering session or a design walkthrough or
holding focus groups, the true measure of project success will be stakeholder satisfaction,” she says.

Making an effort to understand a stakeholder’s position and taking their feedback to heart can go a long
way toward developing mutually beneficial, trusting relationships. “When a stakeholder understands and
believes that the project team is truly interested in addressing their concerns, they will come to trust the
decisions being made by the project team,” making them more likely to support proposed solutions,
Munro says.
The result will be a more successful project overall. “Current research makes it clear that companies that
meet and exceed customer expectations are the ones that will thrive in our modern world,” Guerrero
says.

Developed by PMI for PMIstandards+ with contributions from Alison Munro, PMP, and Ruth Anne
Guerrero, MBA, PMP. ©PROJECT MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE, INC.