LETTER TO THE EDITOR
10 February 2024
Ref: Stretton, A. (2024). Customer-oriented project management: Adding a genuine customer focus to the dominant project-product focus, PM World Journal, Vol. XIII, Issue II, February. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pmwj138-Feb2024-Stretton-customer-oriented-project-management.pdf
Dear David,
Greetings from Indonesia.
I write to add a short note to Alan Stretton’s polite article in the February edition of PMWJ entitled “Customer-oriented project management: Adding a genuine customer focus to the dominant project-product focus”.
I was a student of Alan’s in 1968; The course was Graduate Diploma in Building Construction, a precursor in Australia to Project Management Master’s Degree courses. He did teach us many tools for project planning, but the dominant theme was customer-user benefit. Levitt’s “Marketing myopia” was prescribed text.
Alan quotes G. J. Dusseldorp, the founder of Lend Lease Corporation, where Alan worked: ‘…our approach has always been to seek out what the marketplace wants… We seek the marketplace needs and then design a product to suit this need’.
Dusseldorp brought a team around him that excelled at this, and Alan was a critical part of the engine that drove it.
He then went on to help prepare the original PMI PMBOK.
So, my perspective may be biased, but from my point of view, the origins of Project Management are a genuine customer-user focus, not something now being added.
Thank you.
Owen Podger
Bali, Indonesia
How to cite this work: Podger, O. (2024). On the Subject of Customer-Oriented Project Management, Letter to the Editor, PM World Journal, Vol. XIII, Issue III, March. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/pmwj139-Mar2024-Podger-on-Customer-Oriented-Project-Management-Letter-to-Editor.pdf
