Customer Project Management

Accountable

Account Managers of Sales & Account Management, Team Sol

Driver for this Agreement

Project Management is essential during the customer onboarding of complex IT solutions as it streamlines processes and ensures efficient delivery. It facilitates clear communication between customers and technical teams, supports the Product Owner in planning the required work, fosters effective coordination, and with that provides a seamless onboarding experience for our customers.

During our Sales Offering Decisions, we pre-define which teams would contribute, how we would manage the project at a high level, and who would own the onboarding. To simplify these decisions, we need to define how we conduct project management in general and who is responsible by default for ensuring onboarding project management.

This is the opportunity we see. For the driver describing the problems that led to this, see VIP-303.

Process and Responsibilities

When we have an order for something that requires an Onboarding Project (meaning we have to coordinate deliverables, expectations, timeline, and budget between our value stream teams and the customer), Account Management owns the non-technical onboarding, more specifically, one (Key) Account Manager takes the lead.

They Account Manager has to coordinate everything, but can’t do the technical part of defining work packages and tickets or do the more technical communication with the customer side. For this they depend on engineers from the team, and usually especially the Solution Architect who designed what the customer ordered. Still, the Account Manager stays in the lead (not the Solution Architect), but others have to contribute.

  • Sales & Account Management, usually the Inside Sales, performs the general non-technical customer onboarding.

  • Account Management defines who the (Key) Account Manager is.

  • The Account Manager:

    • organizes and hosts a kick-off meeting with the customer and needed engineers from VSHN.

    • begins to work with the Solution Architect who was involved in the case and the required Product Owners to define the needed work in the Value Stream Teams.

    • keeps the customer and the involved teams updated.

    • directly or indirectly via the Product Owner, joins the involved team’s planning and sprint reviews to check whether the work done effectively moves the project forward, brings in the needed feedback, and updates the customer.

    • ensures budget control according to the Sales Order and recurring services, while also ensuring that recurring Managed Service billing is working correctly.

    • for larger onboarding, initiates the project retrospective with the involved parties to continuously improve this process.

For AppOps and AppFlow projects: The Technical Project Manager of Nunki takes the technical lead and coordinates with the Account Manager.

Technical Project Manager in Nunki is currently in the role of their Product Owner.

This agreement is tracked and reviewed as Governance Item VIP-303.