Question

We have just completed implementing a successful but problematic project. We want to get a customer representative to travel on site to hold a face to face project retrospective, however we are currently struggling to convince management of the benefits of having the customer on site to have this retrospective.

Does anyone have experience to provide decent justifications to why this would better to be held on site?

Answer 1

Project post mortem (or post partum, if you’d like to use a more optimistic term) meetings involving customers are good for business.

First, the purely business aspects. Assuming you want to retain the customer and continue to work for them, involving a customer representative in the meeting has several positive effects:

• It signals that you are interested in building a productive, long-term relationship with the customer
• It can help the customer get some complaints off of their chest
• It can bring your group closer to the customer, building more of a team feeling
• It shows the customer that you value their input in the development process
• It shows the customer that you are dedicated to improving your internal processes
• It can be an opportunity to help ‘train’ the customer, to make them a better partner for the next project (careful here – must be handled with kid gloves)

Even if you aren’t interested in doing business with this customer in the future, as long as the relationship is not overly acrimonious, it can still be beneficial to have a customer representative at the meeting:

• Give your team an honest picture of how an outside agent views their working style
• Identify potential communication and organizational problems that could affect other projects
• Put a human face on the customer and help your team understand that most customers are probably not as technically-minded as they are

This kind of meeting needs to be led by someone who’s tactful and forceful. You need to create an open atmosphere but also make sure that criticism doesn’t become personal or hurtful. You need to lay out the ground rules up front and enforce them with an iron fist, to make sure the meeting remains on a productive, positive level. It’s good to start the meeting out with a statement like:

While we’re all happy that this project is successfully finished, it’s
also clear that many things could have gone more smoothly along the way. I’ve
invited you all here today to talk openly about what things went right, what
things went wrong, and how we can do a better job of working together on future
projects.

It’s often a good idea to invite all participants to dinner after the meeting. You can celebrate the successful end of the project and continue to cement the team feeling between your group and the customer.