Knowledge Sharing Pattern Language

Problem	The project manager does not know how the customer perceives the project and its results.
Initial Context	Ongoing project or a project very recently closed. An organization having defined some formal way to ask for customer satisfaction information.
Roles	A Project Manager and a customer representative. Also the organization is here present in the form of facilitating objective customer-satisfaction data collection.
Forces	The success of a customer supplier relationship is based on the satisfaction of both parties. From a supplier perspective, it means especially, customer satisfaction. A good level of customer satisfaction may result in new projects with the customer and thus new possibilities for business for the supplier. Customer satisfaction should be collected all along the way and actions should be initiated based on it. In addition some more formal way of collecting customer satisfaction information could be reasonable. To motivate the customer to give feedback, normally some actions are required. The best way to prove the usefulness of this is to have the customer informed about the results and to show that the results have really affected the way of working. People in a project can initiate measuring, but they should not be the direct receiver of the results from the customer. If the customer would need to answer directly, for example, to the Project Manager, in some cases, some part of the feedback might be left out because the receiver has participated in the evaluated project.
Solution	Initiate Customer Satisfaction Measuring. A Project Manager initiates the customer satisfaction measuring. Ask for Feedback and Give Feedback. Feedback is requested from a customer in an interview or by using a web survey. Receive the feedback and Report. An organization receives the feedback and reports it or a summary of it to the project manager. Process the feedback. Project Manager together with the project team processes the results. They plan possible required actions. Evaluate the Project and the Relationship. Based on the customer satisfaction results and feedback from the team, the relationship and the whole project is evaluated. What have worked well and what should be improved? This could be part of a lessons learned session (see Discovered Lessons, KSP15). The resulting lessons learned shall be shared with the organization (see Contributed Experience Base, KSP27). Initiate actions. If required, initiate corrective and preventive actions to improve the relationship and performance. Give Feedback to the Customer and Receive Feedback. Inform the customer at the general level about the results and show in practice that actions have been taken to improve the relationship.
Resulting Context	Well working, open customer supplier relationship with parties committed to further improve the relationship.
Instances	Utilize this pattern at least once per each relevant project. Use it preferably before closure, when the customer starts to see the outcome of the project, but when there is still some time to do possible required corrective actions during the project. One potential pitfall is that the customer is not willing to give feedback. Then new ways of asking for it and analyzing it are required.
Process Connection	Customer satisfaction follow-up.