Do you know the difference between a great PM, and just a so-so? It’s the skills to effective planning, and response strategies to problems during an execution keeping the schedule and budget balanced along with keeping the clients happy.
Project management is not an easy job. The stakes are high, and there’s work to be done People are depending on you to lead them to on-budget-on-time victory. Today, we would be outlining how you can gain command over project management skills for a successful completion and happy clients.
Happy clients are said to be those who had a great experience working with you. You delivered a project that met three elements of project management; good communication, high quality work, and timely delivery. A mix of these three, creates a very high chance of a client returning to your company for future projects.
Timeline
Timely delivery is one of the important aspects to making clients happy. As project managers, you have to understand the importance of this factor. It’s committed to the client, and with all complexities of a project, it must be met. Consequences of failing to achieve a committed timeline result in a penalty on your organization, because of poor scheduling techniques you used. Tough times may arise during project execution. If poorly managed, your project can overrun on schedule, costing your company it’s image and some penalty.
To effectively manage the timeline of a project, consider the following tips:
- Create a clear Work Breakdown structure, and schedule tasks and milestones keeping some buffer.
- Monitor and update activities daily to ensure everything runs as per plan.
- Create a process for managing change.
Some tools you can use to ensure effective scheduling are:
- Gantter: a free cloud based project management tool to assist in developing a project plan, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, and analyzing workloads.
- Asana: a web and mobile application designed to help teams track their work. Asana’s integration with applications like Dropbox, HipChat, Slack, and Instagantt, just to name a few, promote a collaborative environment ensure easy monitoring and timeliness completion of a project.
Quality
Quality is another important aspect from a happy client’s point of view. They believe you will provide a great expectation in terms of quality of the project. Quality of a product can be measured in terms of performance, reliability and durability. A bug free user interface and a stellar user experience both contribute to a good quality solution. Quality is a crucial parameter which differentiates an organization from its competitors. How do you think businesses are run? They don’t completely rely on new clients, but instead aim to create loyal customers, who would back to them for their future endeavors; and quality plays an important role here.
To effectively ensure high quality standards, consider the following points:
- Establish quality management standards for the project and your team’s performance.
- Use task management and bug tracking softwares that are accessible to all. Web based applications such as Trello and YouTrack help teams stay updated on the status of each item. This eventually improves productivity of the team and ensures monitoring and controlling of all tasks and issues respectively.
- Implement unit testing practices; test early, test often. Great quality assurance guarantees timely delivery, quick turnaround testing solutions by using testing best practices and offers more stability and better performance.
- Empower team members by assigning them a different role on different projects. For example, a well experienced designer is aware of the UI issues that may arise, and hence this resource can be utilized by giving them a role of a Design QA on some other project. Similarly, a developer can be assigned an SQA role on some other project. This diverse responsibility is appreciated by resources, and helps to excel presentation of applications.
Tools you can use for automation testing and bug tracking are:
- Trello: an easy to use application to keep track of every minute detail of a project.
- TestComplete: an automated testing platform for Windows, Android, and iOS applications. Record and playback test creation records the actions of a tester performing a manual test and allows it to be played back and maintained.
- TestObject: Allows you to test your application on real devices, receive quality reports, and run automated tests such as Robotium, Espresso, and Apium.
Communication
Good communication is amongst the three top areas that lead to happy clients. Whether it’s a meeting or an e-mail, effective communication serves as a bedrock to the business. Communication during a project happens both internally, with the team, and externally, with the client. Project managers have to be good listeners. They have to communicate with the client in a highly professional manner along with understanding what the client is trying to convey. Certain information then is communicated with the team. Poor communication eventually increases the risks that are involved in the project. According to PMI’s Essential role of Communication report, 80% of projects, in organizations that consider effective communication, met original goals.
Remember these tips for effective communication during a project:
- Whenever a project is initiated, it’s essential for the project managers to define the roles and responsibilities of every team member. When a responsibility and accountability matrix is created, project managers are able to easily monitor the resources that would be performing the tasks.
- Good project managers also regularly interact with their team, just to see how things are going, or if there are any professional or personal issues being faced. This helps them foresee internal problems that may arise and mitigate them early on. This not only saves time in the long run, but it also keeps the team members motivated as they are constantly providing feedback and are valued.
- Any project will have some people who need to be updated regularly about the progress of the project. Effective communication with these stakeholders is essential. For this, it’s important to create an effective communication plan and strategy. As the expectation of every stakeholder may be different, the communication strategy shall also vary slightly for each. To create a communication plan, you need to answer a few questions:
- What kind of communication is required?
- Who needs to be communicated with?
- How frequently must the person be communicated with?
- What needs to be communicated? (reports, minutes, wireframes, etc)
Some tools and techniques you can use for effective communication are:
- Basecamp: One of the most renowned project communication and coordination tool available online. Basecamp allows all members to stay updated on the project, where you can communicate, share files, post announcements and plenty other exciting features. It’s also one of the most preferred tools for project communication with clients.
- Slack: In just a few months, Slack has become one of the most widely used internal communication tool in small-medium sized companies. This free tool allows you to share files, create private groups, personal messaging, and integration with various third party tools project management tools such as Trello. Their mobile apps allow you to stay updated wherever you are.
- Daily standup meetings: As there is so much written communication already, daily stand-up meetings help in sharing the work performed by team members during the past 24 hours and to plan what will be done during the day. It also allows team members to share any issues or difficulty they faced during the tasks they performed the day before.
Wrap up
The knowledge areas of project management do contribute to ensuring a successful project. But, from a happy client’s point of view, timely delivery, high quality, and effective communication matter the most. They are the deciding factors of your client’s long term relationship with your company. Thus, implementing effective measures and tools are necessary to build loyal customers; those who would return to you for further projects.
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