Recent
research conducted by gapZEN indicates that, not surprisingly, 94% of customers
have paid custom development firms for project work that was delivered overdue
or over budget. And usually significantly so. Why, in spite of today’s plethora
of powerful project management tools, do most customers feel powerless to
control the outcome of the projects they are paying for?
The reasons
are undoubtedly myriad and complex. One possible explanation is that most
project management tools are focused on helping the custom developer manage the
internal complexities of a project and fall far short when it comes to managing
external customer expectations around scope, schedule and budget.
Over the
course of a project, communication becomes a big problem as status reports are sometimes
irregular, usually uninformative, and often calculated with data from an increasingly
stale baseline project plan that is rarely, if ever updated with true rigor. In
the end, most customers end up angry and frustrated when due dates keep
slipping and budgets skyrocket.
A new web
tool called gapZEN was launched this week to solve these problems. Based on the
proven process laid out in Harvard’s book Project Management for Profit, gapZEN can be used in conjunction with other project management tools to give project
customers more firepower to mitigate risk and ensure they are only paying for
work completed on-time and on-budget.
