ONE

Metallica once wrote a song called ONE. It was about loneliness and how it feels being without any connection with the surrounding world. The background was the terrible WorldWar I, where millions of people were killed for no reason at all.

Some corporations seems to be in the same mood as Metallica in ONE. They have no contact or feeling for the surrounding environment the live in. This is the absolute opposite to being ONE with your customer as Stefan Engeseth lays out in his book ONE.

What does it mean being one with your customer? What does it mean being one with your supplier? Being ONE with your company?

I can see several examples where people are not ONE with even themselves ;-)

My main issue here is how to become ONE? I think that it is both a mental state. If you are ONE you always try to understand the customer (even if you don't always agree). To understand a customer you have to live and breathe the same air as your customer. This can be to use the same shoes as your customer, live in the same kind of neighbourhood, shop in the same shops etc.

When it comes to projects (which is the main topic for this blog) it is very important that the project involves the customer. This can be done as in XP/Agile where the customer should sit on the project to be able to answer questions as they arise, in real-time. RUP and PMI focuses much on requirements gathering and processes around handling changing requirements. The RUP and PMI ways are more formal than the XP/Agile methods. So the method you should choose in your project depends a lot on the requirements on the project. But they all have in common that they focus on the projects and stresses the importance of customer involvement, the project being ONE with the customer.