Customer perception of delivery quality: a necessary area for attention for project managers

  • Authors:
  • Ir. Jaap van Ekris

  • Affiliations:
  • IT Global Services, Bilthoven, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • SE '08 Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Customer retention is vital for the survival of software development organizations, especially under current economic trend of global outsourcing. For a software development organization it is very advantageous to be able to use one project with a customer as a stepping stone for another. However, many software development projects fail and even successful projects might not guarantee repeat business. The most dominant definition of project success defines success as the delivery of the desired product on time and within budget. This definition is used in many project management and process improvement methods. In this article we show that this definition of project success has a blind spot to aspects are extremely relevant for customer retention. This poses the question what a project leader should do in order to help his company gain competitive advantage. We indicate that delivery quality might be a potential area of improvement for software development teams in order to satisfy customers to the level of rebuy intentions.