Ques: What are generally program level risks while you are in the process of writing charter for your program?

Ans:

Following are generally program level risks at the time of writing charter:

1. Stability of requirements: mitigation 1,2 
2. Delay in project receivables : mitigation 1, 2, 3  
3. Delay in clarifications, reviews, approval and closure of issues: mitigation 1, ,2 3
4. Change in H/W versions: mitigation  1, 4

Impact: All above are likely to impact project quality, timelines, effort and cost. 

Mitigation: 

1. Impact analysis should be done and all stakeholder should be informed
2. Integrated change management process need to be followed to incorporate changes
3. Escalate through the defined and mutually agreed escalation route
4. Real targeted h/w and s/w environment needs to be frozen along with the requirements

How you can extract information effectively from a customer organization which is very reluctant to provide information pro-actively? Answers to queries are very much delayed.

Ans: There could be following reasons because of which customer organization is either reluctant or provides delayed responses:

1. Priority: Customer may not be taking you on priority, you may want to understand this and negotiate an SLA with the customer for responding to the queries, you can devise a tracking mechanism and start reporting loss of time/schedule, money, effort etc due to delayed responses and non-conformance to the SLA. You just need to safeguard your team/project.
2. Business: Customer at times is busy and occupied in other stuff. If it becomes a regular practice, suggest the customer to introduce an onsite coordinator.
3. Mismatch in standard of knowledge: You may be asking trivial questions which is not matching the knowledge standard of the customer, in this case, raise your knowledge standard by doing study, presentations and training.
4. Solution Selling: Solution selling is a sales methodology. Rather than just promoting an existing product, the salesperson focuses on the customer's pain(s) and addresses the issue with his or her offerings (product and services). The resolution of the pain is what constitutes a true "solution". Hence you need to frame your questions which portray that your questions are trying to solve some customer pain directly or indirectly. Since customer knows his pains, hence probability of responding to your questions will increase.