Project management failures and hopeless customers

Post date: Jul 31, 2014 2:10:43 PM

Project management failures and hopeless customers. This is way too common. Finished reading project manager magazine which went through these matters once again. Nothing has changed, customers wants something, today, for free and then it should be something very great, but I'm not sure yet what it should be. - All so familiar story over and over again. Then starts complaining why it's taking so long, and why it isn't ready (what we haven't even ordered) and haven't received offer about, because we don't know what it should be.

But sometimes, there are smart and competent customers out there, and it's just great to work with them. Without always falling back to that totally hopeless discussion pattern described in first paragraph.

One customer thought that if they buy automatic stock management software, it would solve their stock issues. Because nobody knew what they have in stock and what they need. Well, if they don't feed required information into the system, it won't help. Worst customers are those, which are so totally and absolutely clueless about their business, that they don't even have faintest idea what they really need, and what fulfilling the need requires.

In Finnish media there was an article about very small software company, which thought they would need extensive project and resource management system, because without it it's impossible to manage projects and resources. Well well, it was it. All the capital they had, they spent on their ERP product, and they didn't ship anything else out at all. Is this correct focus of resources? - Of course it isn't.