The difficult first (two) day(s) in a customer project

by Heinrich Preuß

Now that the halfway point of client projects is over, it's a good time to look back and reflect on how things have gone so far. In this blog post, I don't want to bore you with all the things that went well and that I'm happy with, but I do want to write about the biggest problem I see with every project.


How can we see sooner than Wednesday what each of us will end up doing?


In a simple world, a new client would greet us at kick-off and say they've already divided the work into seven equal parts. In a world where neither money nor time mattered, we would get seven different customers, one for each data schooler. In the real world, both of those scenarios won't happen, and after kick-off, the first thing that naturally happens is a call from all of us, figuring out what to do now.


Sometimes the customer has some minor extra requests that have nothing to do with the main topic. When that happens, that's the lucky moment for any predator, when a young and small animal leaves the herd and becomes easy prey. I had that one time and there were many moments that week when I was glad I didn't have to discuss the bigger issues in the larger group. So I'm really thinking about how we can get through the division of labor more quickly and smoothly. Unfortunately, this blog post doesn't provide the solution, but maybe some of you already have it and we can learn from you.


The biggest part of the problem is the unknown data on Monday. When you only have one or two data sets, there is no other option but to have multiple people looking at the same record at the same time, often even while calling each other. On the one hand, this keeps you from being overwhelmed by all the new tasks, because a problem shared is a problem halved, but it also takes a lot of time and is very inefficient.


One possible step to make it more efficient is to think about problems that don't require understanding the data and therefore can be done from the beginning. For example, scheduling customer contacts for the week, or creating a template (which can be used for either dashboards if you're creating them, or slides if you're just using PowerPoint).


Another approach might be an immediate split after the kick-off into business model and data. One part of the group would immediately deal with the data while the others clarify the business model and/or project requirements. Sometimes the data would be pretty hard to understand without having the business model in mind, but I can think of some cases where this would be possible.


As I said, these considerations are far from a solution, and perhaps you can share your thoughts or approaches to this problem.

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Heinrich Preuß

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