Higher management always encourages their people to create added value for the customer to exceed their expectations and there are different ways that project teams can add value to their customer that is outside of the scope of work agreed upon; following are some of these things:
1. Doing additional tasks like migration of data, reconciliation of records
2. Added screen processing
3. Data encoding
4. Allocation of more people without extra charge
5. Working overtime to help in additional support
6. Giving training to business process owners
Keeping the client happy is the utmost concern of the business; but should be accomplished according to what was agreed upon. Doing additional work is bad management because as project teams get more work as previously been planned, some things are sacrificed in the process which include: resource, money, quality or even happiness of team members who get to do more work.
Manager’s priority
The only priority of the project manager is to deliver what was signed and agreed upon by all parties involved, other things outside the scope should be discussed and have to go through the proper change control processes. By adding more work, project managers endanger the quality and deliverables of what is written in the contract and failure to comply with what was expected is going to be a nightmare in the end. PMs should never use their additional free work as the cause of the delay because it only shows the kind of management capabilities the person has.
Real value of the engagement
The real value that the business could provide to the client is to meet all deliverables, on time, on budget and of the highest quality. The time spent on additional free work should be used to provide the highest quality of work instead.
When to create additional value
I don’t see any reason why project managers should give additional output outside of what has been agreed upon. Change control processes should be used if the request made by the customer is significant to the overall quality of the deliverable.
However, if the team has completed all deliverables ahead of time and with fewer resources, project managers may offer additional value since I seriously doubt if contracts have refund agreements in them. This is the only time managers may consider giving that extra value but within reasonable limits.
[tags]Project Management[/tags]
