The Ideal Customer: One Person Who Calls The Shots

Further reading from Mr. Parmenter’s “Key Performance Indicators”, unveiled this nugget; “Any layer between the CEO and the [KPI] team indicates that Step 1 has not been successfully achieved. This point is so important that the project should not proceed if the CEO does wish to be involved in this way.”

Mr. Parmenter’s point is that the KPI project team should report directly to the CEO and no one else.

I was just talking to my oft-quotable, former business partner, Roy Allen. He said, “I only want to work with customers who have a single person who is responsible for the entire organization, and that person mandates what the other employees of that organization do.”

In other words, Roy likes decision makers who actually make decisions and he wants to report directly to that decision maker. He feels like that’s the only way to ensure success of his projects at that organization.

I don’t know about Roy’s projects, but Business Intelligence projects need a top-down mandate in order to succeed. I don’t always get to report to the CEO, but I love it when I do.