Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
10
Customer Expectation
Management
In today's world of outsourcing, customer expectation management is the most
important part of your job function. Never mind that you do your assignments
fine; if your customer is not happy over some issue, then you are digging your own
grave.
What are the expectations of the customer? Good question! Depending on the
kind of agreement your company has with the customer, they can vary. I am assum-
ing that you are working for a software services company who outsources software
development or software test projects from customers. This agreement could be for
product development or software testing, or it could be for a software implementa-
tion project.
10.1 Difficult Proposition
Software projects are characterized by low success rates. Only about 20% of the
projects are delivered within a specified budget and schedule [1]. Even within this
category only about 10% of the projects deliver exactly as promised quality and
other specifications. So 10% of these still miss on quality parameters. A whopping
80% of the software projects fail in terms of delivering late or over budget or not
fulfilling promised functionality.
These failure rates are due to many reasons. Foremost is that software proj-
ects do not have detailed design specifications compared with the ones seen in
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