My Customer Doesn’t Want to be Happy

By Denise DeCarlo, PMP

Project management is never easy – but it sure is a lot more fruitful and rewarding when people around you WANT to be successful and want to work together toward a common goal. So what happens when you have a customer that DOESN’T want to be happy and/or satisfied with the results the team is working so hard to produce? What if, no matter what you do, they just aren’t satisfied? This certainly brings some challenging situations to the surface—but it doesn’t necessarily mean the project will be a failure. In this article we will discuss ways to deal with this very frustrating scenario.

For the purposes of this article, the term “customer” is used generically. It could be any significant stakeholder on your project – such as the sponsor, your end consumer of the product, a manager within the business unit your product is being developed for, etc. It’s a significant stakeholder of the project that needs to be “cared for.” This is a stakeholder who is getting the attention of team members through less than ideal behaviors.

Now let’s define “not being happy.” No matter what you or your team does it never seems to be “enough” or the customer believes it is something “you should have done anyhow.” In fact, the customer may actually be satisfied with your progress but they will never tell you this as a means to consistently have you “feel the pressure” to produce even more or better deliverables. Some customers believe this is a way to motivate the team to higher aspirations. They are concerned about “letting up” as you may then ease off and not achieve the targeted milestones. This can be very frustrating to you and your team as you’ll have no way to measure your success via the immediate feedback from your customer. The end result of the project is still quite important to the customer – however – throughout the project they give you the impression that you are not meeting their expectations.

Below are seven approaches you can take to address this situation:

1. Recognize this is the situation. This sounds “obvious” but sometimes we don’t even realize this until the pattern begins to repeat itself over and over again. If you’re working with a customer that you have not worked with in the past you’ll need to get to know them and then assess if this is the situation. To quickly assess the attitude of your stakeholder you may need to talk with other project managers or managers who have worked with this customer in the past to understand what it was like to work with him/her.

Common indicators that you have a customer who doesn’t want to be happy include consistent comments such as; “I didn’t think you’d achieve that goal”, “Why is the team not working harder?” and “Why can’t you bring the end-date in?”

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