I had an interesting conversation yesterday with our project team that has been shepherding an Identity Management implementation for an educational institution. The project had been languishing because the customer frankly didn’t place enough priority on the project to allow key resources to spend the required time to meet scheduled milestones.

However, the customer made a seemingly unrelated business decision to implement a new system. All of a sudden, they realized that provisioning user accounts on the new system could be most easily done with the Identity Management system our team was trying to implement.

Voila! All of a sudden, the customer’s priorities for the Identity Management system were aligned with their new initiative. Now, almost magically, resources were available, the customer was hungry to accelerate activities and our team could make meaningful progress once again.

The lesson? Magic happens when customer and vendor priorities are in lockstep. Real life business value really does drive progress.

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