Ken VaughnPartner| Industrial Fabrication Consultants LLPCharleston, Sc, United States
One thing we have resolved to do is to be proactive about letting clients know what the current state of their project is at any given moment or making this information available to them. I know for some, if not the majority in our world the attitude is "if they want to know, they'll ask". But in our opinion this is the wrong approach.
I personally have seen situations where if a client wants this kind of information they have to embark on a fact finding mission, research if you will. Uncertainty and apprehension about what is going on can breed misconceptions and generally increase angst which is not good for us.
In our business we can not only tell a client where their project stands we can also show them. And in a case where there is a great physical distance between where the project work is being done and where they are it's all the more essential in our opinion. We provide photographic and video documentation in addition to text based reporting to the key entities in the client organization.
We feel our default SOP for this should be to provide information by whatever means rather than being asked for it. In addition to this we think it makes sense to never, ever hide set-backs or problems in hopes the client won't notice. As with other relationships be they B2C or B2B things will happen, failures will occur. The true test of a professional organization is how the failure is handled. Is it acknowledged and steps taken to prevent recurrence, or is it ignored, rationalized or denied? I think the former will serve us better in the long run.
What strategies and techniques do you use to keep clients informed about project progress? Saving Changes...
We recognized that while the clients want to know what's going on, they're generally not comfortable down in the weeds, so being updated by the technical staff wasn't always a good fit for us. We opted to post progress information on our intranet -- on a page dedicated to that project. The info is posted in summary form, which provides the overview that most want, with the opportunity for those who want more to come see us to discuss. Saving Changes...
When building and agreeing your comms plan with your board it is helpful to get a comms professional involved (most large organisations have a comms team, usually found somewhere in Marketing). Depending on the audience, I have used various formal reports, informal newsletters, posters, leaflets, talks and presentations, as well as intranet and articles in existing staff bulletins and so on. Keep the messages concise and relevant and keep people interested too. It is rare that anyone communicates too much, and although it can be a lot of effort it is very worthwhile. Saving Changes...
Ken VaughnPartner| Industrial Fabrication Consultants LLPCharleston, Sc, United States
Tim, Doug, Thanks for your responses. This is good information. While some online PM solutions have features to support keeping the client informed we are interested in options where information and reporting readily accessible to the client is the main focus. We're considering some custom or modified PHP scripts for this. Saving Changes...
