Perception Management

I had a manager who used to say, “Perceptions are reality unless you change it”. He used to say that if someone perceives you as a poor programmer, even though you yourself might not think so, you remain a poor programmer, unless you proactively do something to change the other person’s perception. And this is not limited only to perceptions regarding people. It is also true for projects!

We had a peculiar situation in one of our projects. The project was running its normal course and as usual towards the end of the project, there were a few loose strings to be tied up here and there. However, that simple issue had somehow got ballooned up in the mind of the client and created the perception that there is a crisis. Escalations were done and after of lot of management attention, everyone realized that it was a non-issue! It was just that the perception of the client was different from what was the ground reality. And the ground reality was that the project was scheduled to meet the target date.

Hence, apart from client expectations management, we need to manage the perceptions of the client also. This will save a lot of time and effort in firefighting for an imaginary fire and convincing the client!