I caught site of a post about managing client expectations. Lots of us have projects to implement which involve not only folks from within our organisation, but clients, suppliers, contractors from other organisations. Sometimes managing the to-ing and fro-ing of who’s doing what where and when, and what the expectations around these goals are, can become confusing, tied up in email threads and telephone conversations that not everyone is involved with or remembers.
There Must Be a Better Plan?
Enter Milestone Planner. Here it is easy to set up a project space that all of the different collaborators can be involved in, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of your organisation. When one person needs to know where folks are at with a particular aspect of the project, they simply check the history of that milestone to be brought up to date – no need to trawl through emails or arrange an unnecessary meeting.
Working Independently Together
Each person can update the individual aspects of the project autonomously, without needing to worry about whether they have informed the right people – anyone who needs to know will be able to see at a glance. Effective communication is key to the smooth running of a project, but as Craig Buckler warns:
“Be careful not to bombard them with multiple calls and never make assumptions about their decisions.”
Milestone Planner can provide the forum to strike the balance between effective communication and overdoing the phone calls and meetings.
“The client is unlikely to be concerned by your PC crashes, hard disk failures, or child-care issues — but they will care about schedule slippages. Be honest, explain the situation, the risks, and what you are doing to solve the problem.”
There are no surprises in a Milestone Planner project. As soon as something slips, it is transparent to everyone on the project, and the history of each milestone allows everyone to keep track of why things have changed.
Transparency is key to managing expectations.