Your new super client has said yes! You aced your pitch, emails and chats have gone back-and-forth getting the details “just right”. The team is lined up, you’re all getting together to figure out what’s needed and how your next delivery’s jigsaw puzzle is going to look.
The team are all fired up and production is now well in flow. Some first drafts have gone back to the client, and although the feedback is superb – there are a couple of items that you have agreed on that don’t work quite as well in practice, so will need a bit of tweaking.
Has going the extra mile ever sent you miles off course?
With Project management as an ‘extra’ activity for many workflows, a team’s enthusiasm for getting a project delivered with A1 customer service can lead to additional items getting done without the customer even knowing. These unbudgeted extras will impact profitability, but also your ability to deliver the project successfully and on time.
Taking your eye off the plan, or not having a clear enough plan to start with can turn your dream project into something rather more frustrating, for you and potentially your customer too. If you have a clear plan, it’s easy to assess if a requested task is part of the original brief or not, so you can quickly decide how best to deliver it.
If your projects sometimes go adrift, follow our top tips to keep everything on track:
- However small your project, make sure that you have communicated what you will be delivering for your customer.
- Always keep your customer up to date with your progress; let them know what is going well and when you’ve got stuck.
- If something is an extra, don’t be afraid to let your customer know – even if you’re happy to deliver it within the original budget.
- If the extra is big, maybe annex it as an additional piece of work to complete afterwards so that your main project isn’t impacted
- Use a collaborative task management tool to make your customers’ experience is a success, every time.