The pure communication is the number one knock against any Project Manager.
The most important thing that you can do as a PM to help yourself and thus the relationship with your customer, is to communicate clearly and frequently with them. Actually, this is always in your PMI training, but you will be surprised, that the place we all fall down the most is communication and especially, communication between stakeholders and project manager.
Exhibit 1.
For sure, we can reference this famous “project-spotting” picture, as an example
of wrong communication during the project cycle, but actually, the first well documented failure
due to project-related miscommunication was the Babylon Tower (never completed).
Basically speaking, customers hate silence. They expect to be kept up to date on projects from the very start to the very end so, if you are not communicating, it is not appreciated and they are escalating their questions to their management that start communication with your management and finally you will be called upstairs. Communication from start to end is essential to your customers success and consequently to your personal success. Even if you can have the most fabulous plan and execute flawlessly, but if you do not communicate that to the customer, it is almost all for naught. They will still be wondering what happened – even if you are successful.
There are many forms of communication that you need to use, but all can be either about known or about unknown.
1. Known – the status updates and other foreseen communications.
At the outset of a project – give them a call, literally. On the phone let them know you are working on the project. Send them an email or leave a voice mail, if they are not there. Set a good tone with them, that they can call you and you will be talking with them. It is a time to talk about a positive feedback – briefly, but let them know you are expecting one.
Set up and have the kick-off meeting. Call them ahead of time to ensure they know it is happening and to bring any concerns they may have. Follow up it with minutes. Actually, it is a good idea to follow up every meeting regarding the project.
Depending on the category and complexity of the project set up bi-weekly, weekly or or even more frequent meetings.
Update your status reports weekly or more frequently if there are a lot of activities, decisions or milestones.
When there are major milestones – review these with the customer both before and after. If this is in addition to the regularly set project meetings, there would be assurance they would not be drown in routines.
When you are nearing the end of the project let them know the close-out process and that you will be sending a close-out letter. Go over the finances with them so there would be no questions about billable items.
2. Unknown – the hard ones, especially when they pop up behind your back.
First of all, be mindful of expectations and call or meet in person every once in a while just to say “hi” and see how things are going. Pull out the review to see if you are still on track or need to make some changes. Personal face to face time over the coffee is usually appreciated. It can generously pay later, when simple question and answer will spare you weeks of hard monkey work.
If you have assumption check it against customer expectation one more time and in case, if situation is changed, inform the the project team with no hesitation. Your job, as PM, is rising red flags and not hiding them behind your back.
When you are needing scope changes, make sure you review that in person or on the phone and use mail as confirmation. The reverse practice is known for creating delays.
If you don’t have answer on customer question, just give them a call and let them know it is on the way and when you expect it back.To say it again, silence is not gold in this case.
If you don’t think you have enough information then do not cut communication. This is a short term strategy that makes for less happy customers and creates challenges to sign-off the scope changes. So, communicate that and they will know what is going on. But if the customer do not know what is going on, they are less likely to negotiate and sign up and more likely just to press you with their concerns.
Remember – it always pays to ask questions up front if you do not know – it is very costly to go back and fix something after the fact. Just ask and try to get the answer as quickly as possible or, at the very least, to point you to someone, who should be able to get you an answer. As an example from personal experience, one time, if we were all just a little more knowledgeable we would not have to have spent few months to correct the error taken as assumption in the project scope.
As a simple trick, that can help you to be more engaged with stakeholder or customer, don’t forget to tell the current date in your message to auto-reply machine. This always gives to recipient the clue when you ware here and probably will set the right tone to identify if the message was urgent or requires the follow up.
