Thursday, April 20, 2006
Empowerment
As a consultant, one of my goals is to empower clients to become self-sufficient, successful, and effective. Empowerment is one of the key aspects of modern businesses -- it is what allows consultants to become successful with the client, and an enterprise to become successful with their customers. This post is about how an enterprise can empower the customer to make them more productive with them and their product/service than without them.
Being indispensable to your customer is a good strategy. Being indispensably helpful is yet another. Empowering and Enabling your customer is yet even better. This is what makes the largest IT companies in the world the most successful -- these companies don't just sell software, they allow you to do more things with their products/services. This works not only for IT companies, but also more traditional businesses: if you sell something that allows the customer to become happy, empowered, and productive, then their success is translated to your success.
Throughout the next few days/weeks, I will tackle some aspects of Agile Development which will emphasize on the empowerment of project stakeholders, especially software developers and managers.
This is a considerably broad and tricky topic, and I hope I can do justice to the different advice that other people before me have already suggested.
Knowledge is Power. Height is Might. Knowing more allows you to see what you don't know yet. Growing more allows you to see how much bigger you can grow. But knowing enough and staying high enough breeds stagnation, and there is no power without change. Only through progressive change can results be found and measurements taken.
Being indispensable to your customer is a good strategy. Being indispensably helpful is yet another. Empowering and Enabling your customer is yet even better. This is what makes the largest IT companies in the world the most successful -- these companies don't just sell software, they allow you to do more things with their products/services. This works not only for IT companies, but also more traditional businesses: if you sell something that allows the customer to become happy, empowered, and productive, then their success is translated to your success.
Throughout the next few days/weeks, I will tackle some aspects of Agile Development which will emphasize on the empowerment of project stakeholders, especially software developers and managers.
This is a considerably broad and tricky topic, and I hope I can do justice to the different advice that other people before me have already suggested.
Knowledge is Power. Height is Might. Knowing more allows you to see what you don't know yet. Growing more allows you to see how much bigger you can grow. But knowing enough and staying high enough breeds stagnation, and there is no power without change. Only through progressive change can results be found and measurements taken.
