The Customer Who Pays Isn’t Always the Customer Who Matters
Every disaster in service and delivery starts the same way: someone picked the wrong customer. A doctor who prescribes based on what a pharmaceutical company favours, rather than what the patient actually needs, isn’t practising medicine anymore — they’re distributing product. A laboratory that optimises for the client who orders the test, rather than the patient the result is meant to serve, has quietly redefined who it exists for. Nobody signed off on that redefinition. It happened by default, because nobody asked the question directly enough.
The same pattern shows up in ERP delivery, just wearing different clothes. If a System Owner behaves like a customer of the implementation, rather than the owner of the system they’re inheriting, they’ll keep doing what customers do: raising issues, waiting for someone else to fix them, holding the Project Manager to account for outcomes instead of holding themselves to account for decisions. The project doesn’t fail because the System Owner is disengaged. It fails because nobody clarified they were never meant to be a customer of their own system in the first place.
This is why “who is our customer” deserves a genuine deep dive, not a five-minute assumption. A full understanding of your stakeholders often reveals there isn’t one customer — there are at least two, and they frequently want different things. One customer pays the bills. Another uses the service, or lives with the product, every day. Treat them as the same person and you’ll optimise for whichever one is loudest or closest — usually the payer — while the user quietly absorbs whatever gets left over.
Take the time to fully understand your customer, and your customer groups, and something changes. Choices that looked obvious start to look arbitrary. Decisions that felt settled reopen. It isn’t a comfortable process, but it’s the one that determines whether what you build actually serves the person who has to live with it.
So before the next steering committee assumes it already knows who it’s serving — has anyone actually asked, out loud, who the customer is, and whether the person paying and the person using are even the same one?
