Commentary -- Using Client Feedback to Evaluate Project Managers

Client satisfaction with your firm, and their willingness to give you new work, depends greatly upon their interactions with your project managers. For most projects, no other individuals in your firm have their frequency and diversity of client contact.

Project managers who can keep clients satisfied while delivering high quality design and related services are your most effective marketing resource. You would probably agree with this as a general rule. And yet, so many consulting firms do not train their project managers but allow them to sink-or-swim on actual assignments. Learn by doing. The best managers thrive, many struggle, and the rest fade away.

Technical professionals by nature are focused on their work. They try as best they can to respond to client requests and concerns but reactively in most cases. They act after a problem or issue surfaces. Few project managers have any real sense for the needs, priorities and concerns of clients except what they learn over the years by trial and error. Their learning is often costly to clients and detrimental to your firm.

Professional development in various aspects of project management tends to gloss over client issues, dealing mainly in general principles that are easily forgotten. To make the training relevant and useful immediately, project managers need detailed client feedback on active and just completed projects.

Nearly always missed in such development efforts is performance evaluation — evaluation prior to training to establish a reference or baseline performance, and periodic evaluation thereafter to assess the degree of improvement being achieved. Post-training evaluation also helps pinpoint areas of continued weakness so that remedial efforts can be sharply focused.

Client feedback for both training targeting and progress evaluation can be obtained in a number of ways. This topic is addressed in a separate commentary (contact us for a copy of our commentary on "Choosing a Measurement Technique"). What is critical is that the feedback be sufficiently detailed to identify areas in which a project manager may not be performing acceptably.

A growing number of industrial companies are adopting the "ABC" system of ranking employees that has been popularized by GE among others. This system, which requires classifying the bottom 10% of each group as "C" performers and sending them along to a new worklife, can be effective if applied fairly and consistently. It creates an aggressive, competitive, rather ruthless corporate culture that few of us would enjoy. There is, fortunately, a somewhat less extreme approach.

The key is using client feedback on performance constructively from the project manager's standpoint. This means that performance evaluations are directed toward professional development rather than toward identifying and removing weaker performers.

The distinction here is extremely important to the effectiveness of the entire process. If your managers know that evaluations are intended to help them become stronger project managers and improve their client relationships, then most will enthusiastically support the process. The experience will be a positive one for the majority of participants.

It is vital that performance evaluation for purposes of promotion and continued employment be kept strictly separate from performance evaluation for development purposes. This is fairly easy to do but it must be done carefully.

The principle here should be obvious — feedback from a number of sources nearly always presents a more complete, accurate and fairer picture of performance. It helps minimize the impact of personality conflicts between a project manager and one of the people in the client organization (most "clients' are really a number of people, not a single person — contact us for a copy of our commentary on "Defining the Client").

Feedback from multiple sources also gives you a much better foundation for evaluating performance across a range of dimensions. This is important in making a sound evaluation of project managers with quite different strengths and weaknesses. You will have great managers who have glaring weaknesses in just a few areas but weaknesses easily offset by their strengths. The particular set of strengths and weaknesses may differ from manager to manager so that you need a broad set of metrics to make sure that each person is adequately assessed.

Broad feedback also helps you avoid forcing a manager who is already strong in a particular aspect of performance to participate in development aimed at that aspect. The main target of such evaluation should development aimed specifically at each manager's most important weaknesses.

You will also be able to make more effective tradeoffs among a manager's set of strengths and weaknesses and to devise strategies for accommodating hard-to-correct weaknesses in otherwise strong managers. A common example here is the technical guru project manager who is genetically unable to relate well with most clients. Your firm's technical reputation may well rest on the efforts of such individuals. In many cases, the right development response is to ignore as much as possible the guru's interpersonal deficiencies but deal with them indirectly through teaming with a manager who has strong interpersonal abilities.

The first step in using client feedback for performance evaluation should be to establish a performance baseline for each project manager. It is vital to have a starting reference for performance so that you can evaluate progress. Establishing a baseline may involve getting somewhat more detailed feedback from a greater number of client individuals than would be required for progress tracking. Progress tracking can often be narrowed substantially to focus on areas of specific interest.

You will probably also want to develop a comparative evaluation among project managers so that you will have some way to assess top performers from subpar performers. Again, it is important that this assessment be done constructively for professional development purposes. Depending upon how you go about obtaining client feedback, you may also be able to compare your project managers with peer managers in other firms. This can give you a sense for how clients may rate your managers relative to those in other firms during the selection process for new work.

Often forgotten is the creating the essential link between performance measures and important aspects of client response. You don't want to devote much development effort to aspects that do not result in reduced client turnover, higher proposal success rates, lower project costs, and similar measures. You want to focus development on aspects that can make a direct and substantial contribution to the firm.

Baseline performance measures should yield at least a few productive areas upon which initial development efforts might be focused. It is important at the outset to identify several development programs that might be used here. Doing so will help in feedback tool customization and in the interpretation of feedback results. Having some development programs identified at the start of feedback-based performance evaluation will also help reinforce the constructive, positive nature of the program.

Subsequent performance evaluations are vital to assess the effectiveness of whatever development takes place. You may find that a development effort is having no impact whatever, allowing you to redesign the program or replace it. You may find that development in one area is having an adverse impact on other performance areas, giving you the opportunity to refine the development to eliminate the adverse side effect. You may find that some development programs are extremely effective and should become part of basic training for project managers.

Progress tracking also tells you when the need for development in a particular area is continuing. Some managers will adopt new practices and apply new skills very quickly and need no further training. Others may need several doses and perhaps a range of approaches.

As always, it is wise to pilot any new program that impacts core activities. Choose participants who are most likely to be enthusiastic and who may derive solid benefits from early participation. These people can be very important to getting buy-in from other managers as you begin to broaden participation.

For more information on getting client feedback, please contact us for a copy of our "Client Satisfaction Scorecard Overview" document.

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