We have a strong track record of delivering successful projects for our customers, evidenced by an NPS score consistently greater than 9 since we first started tracking it over four years ago, and an SME Cambridgeshire Award for Service Excellence in 2024.
We have delivered over 500 projects in total, and whilst most have been highly successful, it is fair to say that not all have. This is when we look to learn, update our process, and aim to improve. Even when projects are successful, we look at what we could do better.
In this series of blog posts we want to share some of the techniques and processes which have enabled us to be successful, and we would welcome comments and feedback where appropriate.
The Continuous Improvement Cycle
We are at heart a software consultancy, with a strong focus on IoT and related technologies, and the majority of our income is from professional services. This lends itself to a broad range of customer types and project sizes, all of which need to be supported and delivered consistently.
We recognised a number of years ago that like our biggest partner AWS, we had a strong passion for being customer focussed, and this led to us creating a dedicated Customer Success team. Having this capability enables us to keep ourselves honest to the promises we make to customers, and enables our customers voice to be heard within Green Custard. We ensure there is a dedicated Customer Success Manager on all projects.
The first things we need in order for us to be successful for our customers, is that we need to know what outcomes they are wanting to deliver for their business, and we will tie back the project process and ultimate success to these outcomes. This enables both us and our customers to have a concrete sense of success, which in most cases is tangible. We often define both Quantitative and Qualitative metrics for project success.
The second thing we consider is risk. It is important to have conversations with customers about risk, as it enables everyone to understand what could happen. Risk varies considerably, for some customers we provide almost off-the-shelf solutions, e.g. for industrial asset monitoring, whereas in some cases we are building new products for customers. Enabling all stakeholders on a project to discuss risk ensures mitigation is planned early, and ultimately fewer risks become issues, thus reducing cost.
So to summarise, starting projects right for us means agreeing customer outcomes early, along with the success criteria for the project, followed by understanding the risk inherent in a project to mitigate before they add cost to a project.
In the next post we will talk about our delivery process.