What the customer wants vs. what she says

Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog

What the Customer Wants -- In today's piece Laurent writes...

"The most important thing I learned in 15 years could well be the realization that solving someone's problem with code involves listening to that person."

This goes for problem solving without code as well. And as Laurent later talks about when he mentions "joint responsibility" in such an effort, I'd define listening as a two-way proposition.

I'll add a definite agreement here as well. And linking back to one of David Snowden's* three principles of knowledge management, "We can always know more than we can tell, and we will always tell more than we can write down."

In writing a proposal for a client, I discovered that what they wrote in their preliminary project description is very different from what we discussed in person. And I imagine the resulting project will look different still.

* David Snowden created the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity, but all links for Cynefin at IBM seem to be dead. Here is some info on David at AOK.