Project Communication Series: Customer Interfacing

This is more of a general thought in the entire communication process than any one specific communication strategy.  If you subscribe to the same notion that I do – that the process of effective communication is the single most important thing that a project manager does – then you understand that how we interact with the customer is critical to the overall success of the engagement.

Just as important as the project manager’s communications with the customer are the individual project team members’ communications with that same customer.  The part that becomes hard is that as the project manager you’re responsible for ALL communication, but you can’t always police that which you are not a part of.  Nor do you really want to, but it does all come back to you.

So the questions then become:

• How do we (the project manager) best interface with the customer
• How do we prepare our team to interact with the customer
• What actions do we take to oversee all communication
• What do we do when the communication goes wrong?

Project manager – customer interface

The primary function here is to practice frequent and effective communication with the customer.  Most of this done through the creation of informative and accurate weekly material: status reports, project schedules, issues and risks tracking sheets, status calls, and status call notes among other things.

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Project Communication Series: Planning Meeting Agenda

I wanted to use this series as examples of basically all the types of communication that can and does happen on a project.  Since I have no real vision yet of format, it can really be anything.  Specific examples, templates, etc….anything worthy of discussion as relevant and necessary communication on projects.  I still feel that effective and efficient communication is the most critical responsibility of the project manager.  If our readers on here have suggestions of things to cover as part of the communication series, please send them to me or comment on this or subsequent articles.

Below I’d like to present something I found in Carl Pritchard’s book, “The Project Management Communications Toolkit.”  It is basically a template for the project planning meeting agenda – which, as we all know – is a very critical team-to-team communication point on any project.

Here is Mr. Pritchard’s summary for this agenda….

Purpose

Project planning meetings are held, as the name implies, in order to develop all or part of the project plan. They are intended as both data gathering and data-organization sessions. They are intended to generate not only the project plan, but a consensus on that plan and its implementation. The agenda serves as a guide for how these sessions will be held.

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March Survey – Remote Project Management

If you’ve been reading my articles for any length of time you’ll know that I’m somewhat passionate about remote project management and green or sustainable project management practices.  And I believe that one supports the other.

For my March survey – or at least March survey #1 (there may be more) – I’d like to get an indication on where our readership stands on remote project management.  How many of you out there are independent or involved in an organization that supports the management of projects in a primarily remote situation.

And for those of you who are, or have been, involved in the remote management of projects, I’d like to hear what you liked best or least about them.  The capabilities of my website right now still limit my surveying options, but I’ve put up what I think are common pluses and minuses with remote or virtual project management in a team environment.

Please take the survey – it’s completely anonymous and it’s brief … only five questions.  But I think the results could be very interesting.  I’ll close this survey down in 10-15 days and then do a follow-up article on PM Tips analyzing the results.

Please go to this address to complete the survey…

http://www.bradegeland.com/march-survey.html

If any of you survey takers have feedback or something you’d like to add after taking the survey, please feel free to comment on this article or email me at Brad.Egeland@pmtips.net.

Thank you in advance for taking this survey.  Your participation is greatly appreciated by me and everyone at PM Tips and Seavus – the creators of Project Planner and Project Viewer.

CEOs and the Changing Technology Around Them

Today’s CEO is challenged in a way that no CEOs were challenged before.  Technology is changing and too fast for even the CIO of an organization to keep up with, let alone the CEO.  Yet those critical decisions of company direction, how and where to grow the business, and what new technology to incorporate ultimately falls in the lap of the CEO.

How does one person do it?  The right answer is, they don’t.  It’s critical for the CEO to be surrounded by the right people to help him make good decisions for the company.  Just like an employee has to answer to their manager or management team, likewise the CEO is subject to the guidance, oversight, and decision-making of his board of directors.  Everyone is accountable to someone.

Making tough decisions

The CEO must make sound decisions on what new market niches to attack.  He’ll look to his marketing team and expect the right decisions will be made based on their analysis of the industry, but ultimately he’s responsible.

The CEO must make sound technology decisions.  He’ll look to the CIO or IT Director for their input on what direction to take, what technology to acquire, who to partner with, etc., but ultimately it’s his decision and the target is on his head.

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Virtual Teams: Key Success Factors – Part 2

As we identified in Part 1 – seven key success factors for virtual teams are:

• Human resource policies
• Training and on-the-job education and development
• Standard organizational and team processes
• Use of electronic collaboration and communication technology
• Organizational culture
• Leadership support of virtual teams
• Team-leader and team-member competencies

In this Part 2, let’s look deeper at the first four of these: human resource policies, training and development, standard processes, and the use of collaboration and technology.

Human Resource Policies

Human resource policies should support working virtually. Systems must be integrated and aligned to recognize, support, and reward the people who work in and lead virtual teams.

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