BIN Digest

For an experienced project manager, managing a project is easy. With the proper tools, processes and experience in place, overseeing a project from start to finish should be a breeze. There is one variable though, and that is the client. Every client is different and their expectations for the project vary from person to person. Managing your clients is more than half the battle as you navigate through any project.

In order to manage your client’s expectations, you must first understand what their expectations are. The easiest way to do this is to simply ask them. Ask what they want from this project. Ask what indicators of success they would like to see. Then make sure that your reports and final product reflect what they want. There is more than one way to skin a cat, they say, but only one of those ways is what your client wants to see and it’s your job to produce those results. Keeping your client in the loop at all times is another good way to manage their expectations. The fewer surprises that your client is hit with along the way, the more comfortable they will be with the overall project. Keep them updated weekly, bi-monthly, etc so that they always have a good feel as to how well the project is progressing.

For more tips on managing a project or your client’s expectations, visit the Small Business Center at TechInsurance.com. Here you will find tips and tricks for every step of the project development process.

The higher you move up the management ladder, the fewer people you have to answer to. If gone unchecked, this can be a bad thing and the company might suffer because of it. One way to gauge the success of a managed project is to ask the client for whom the project was created. Nobody knows better than the client how effective you and your team were at delivering the desired results in the desired time frame.

When the project first begins, you obviously want to get the client’s input on many things. You want to know in what medium they like to receive correspondence. Do they like email? Do they prefer in-person meetings? And also, how often do they like these check-ins to take place? All of these questions should be asked and answered at the launch of the project. But how often do companies go back to those original specifications and grade themselves? Not very often.

Post project reviews allow you to revisit your original project plan and determine how well you and your team delivered on those promises. Ask the client where your team can improve, as well as what areas you succeeded in. Make sure that you take the suggestions and criticisms to heart. Even if you have had a trouble client for the past 6 months who disliked everything you did for them, you can still learn from their input and possibly sort out the root of the issue and prevent this from happening with other clients in the future.

For more information about post project reviews, visit the Small Business Center on TechInsurance.com. Here you can find tips on how to effectively manage projects from start to finish as well as templates for timelines, scope changes and much more.

As any marketing consultant knows, their clients want the world, they want it now, and they want it cheap. Along with all of this, they expect the best results, whether it is from a magazine ad campaign, or a television or radio campaign. As a marketing consultant, you need to be realistic with your clients. If their budget is small, do not fall victim to nodding your head every time the client makes an outrageous assumption. Nip these outrageous expectations in the bud and make sure that your client is constantly aware of the scope of their project. Both of your budgets will thank you in the end.

Make sure that your client knows exactly what they will be getting with their program. Let them know that based on past projects, they can expect certain things. The important part is to make sure that they are on board with what you plan to deliver and what it will produce for them. Nearly every marketing project fails because of a disconnect between actual value and perceived value. If a client feels like they didn’t get what they paid for, then they will be unhappy when it is all over. Make sure that your client knows exactly what they are getting and what the value will be on the money they spent. If you have this buy-in from the very start, you will have taken a large step towards a successful project, long before the project actually begins.

For more tips on managing marketing projects from timelines to scope changes, visit the Small Business Center from TechInsurance.com.

As you work your way through yet another IT Project, you might be wondering how to make this one more special, meaningful, or just more productive.

Keeping your client happy throughout the process is one of the biggest ways to have a fulfilling project – both in your eyes and the client’s eyes. Just because you think that the project was a success doesn’t necessarily mean that the client will see things the same way. Managing client expectations starts from the beginning of the project, when the timelines, goals, and budgets are laid out. If at this point, the client expects something that your team cannot deliver, then the project is already off to a bad start. As a project manager, it is your job to wrangle the client back in and get them to see the project from a more realistic standpoint, based on what your team’s capabilities are. Ideally, you would want to meet all of your client’s expectations, but in the case that you cannot, you must get them to buy in to what you and your team can actually accomplish.

You can do this a few different ways. You can provide regular project updates so the client always has a structured expectation in front of them. Also, you can provide regular reporting on the goals of the project. If the client sees that the project is producing meaningful results, they will be less likely to ask for something outside of the original project scope since what you and your team is doing has been working.

Overall, the key is constant communication. As soon as you stop communicating with the client, the project begins to get off track. The client might begin to worry and confidence in your team will be lost.

Don’t let this happen to your IT projects. Use the tips and resources available at TechInsurance’s Small Business Center. You will find tips and tricks on running a successful IT project from start to finish, as well as templates and resources for creating reports and project updates.

As a firm that offers candidates for either permanent or temporary positions within IT companies, it is very important that the companies who use your services are completely happy with the employees you provide. The best way to ensure that your client is happy is to be completely honest with them.

Do not tell a company that your candidate has 10 years of experience in a particular field if in reality they do not. If the client expects that they are getting a certified expert in a particular industry, you must deliver that candidate – you can’t deliver a candidate that does not meet their expectations. By being upfront about what types of candidates your staffing firm can present, you will end up with happier, more fulfilled clients. They will be getting exactly what they need and what they expect. In order to make sure that they are completely satisfied, it is important to have a standard follow-up procedure after one of your candidates has been selected. Follow up with the client to ensure that the candidate is working out and performing well.

By getting feedback from the client, you will be better able to refine your selection and placement process. You might be able to see holes or gaps in your interview process that are leading to unqualified candidates being placed in the wrong positions.

For more tips on successfully operating an IT Staffing firm, visit the Small Business Center from TechInsurance. Here you will find tips on selecting the right types of liability insurance, tips on interviewing candidates, and ideas on how to better manage your clients and their expectations.

Now that your project is done, how do you measure its success? Well hopefully you have compiled data on sales, leads, impressions, or whatever you were tracking throughout the extent of your marketing campaign, but was the client happy? To find out, you need to conduct a post project review.

Your review should consist of a series of questions targeted at discovering where you as a project manager or company can improve your services. Discuss items like the effectiveness of meetings, time, and resources spent. Discuss how satisfied the client was with your response times. You should discuss anything and everything that took place during the course of the engagement and have the client give you a score or grade on it.

You can conduct the same testing with your own team to discover any loopholes or gaps in the project management plan. These reviews will show the client that you are dedicated to improving your services, as well as show your team and company some places where services can be improved overall. If you see any trends with any of the answers provided by the client, you might need to take an in depth look at your team and its strategies.

For more information regarding project reviews or other tips for marketing managers, please visit the Small Business Center from TechInsurance.

As an IT Project Manager, or any Project Manager for that matter, you know how important it is to ensure that your client is handed a final product that they will be pleased with. Broken software, incomplete programming and more will not only frustrate your client, but it will severely damage the reputation of your IT company. If you are creating any kind of network, system or software for a client, it is imperative that you have a specific QA system in place.

QA (Quality Assurance) is vital to any kind of project to ensure that the client does not see a version of the project that is not intended for them, that the final project works perfectly, and that the risks associated with producing projects is reduced to as low as possible. As a project manager, you are a form of QA testing, but it needs to go further than that. You need to test every area, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem, ensuring that there will be no bugs when the client tries out your product for the first time.

With a quality assurance program in place, you will reduce costs associated with lawsuits, service calls, and other problems associated with an IT project.

For more tips on managing your risk as an IT Project Manager, visit the Small Business Resource center from TechInsurance. Here you will find tips and resources that will help you manage your IT projects from idea phase to final product delivery.

As a systems integrator, it is your job to make sure that assembly line and similar systems function flawlessly. The only way to make sure that your programming works is to literally try your best to break it. You have to think of any possible commands that an assembly line tech might input and see if any problems arise with your software. Assuring the quality of your software is the foundation of managing your risk as a systems integrator.

If a client comes back and claims that you delivered faulty software and sues you, it is important that you can back up your work by proving that you have an effective quality assurance testing program in place. Not only does having this process documented properly help you in the event of a lawsuit, it should help to prevent the lawsuits from ever occurring cause it will catch most, if not all of the potential problems that could exist with your final product.

For more tips on managing your risk as a systems integrator, visit the Small Business Resource center from TechInsurance. Here you will find tips and resources that will help you manage your software projects from idea phase to final product delivery.

As any project manager knows, as a project progresses, the client asks more questions about the status, expected benefits, and budget. Managing what your clients expect and actually delivering a project that matches up with what they want/need is a very difficult task. Often times, as a client’s budget increases, so do their expectations, and who can blame them. It is your job as the project manager to make sure that the project stays on budget, but that the client receives the value he was promised from the beginning.

If you aren’t careful, there can, and will be, a disconnect between the delivered value of the project and the perceived value from the client. Often times this is caused by a shift in project scope and in the end, the client sees something different than was originally planned and must now be assured that what he has in his hand was worth the money he paid for it.

A good way to do this is with regularly scheduled updates. If your client is constantly kept in the loop as to the status of their project, budget, and deliverables; there will be fewer questions once the project is completed and at the very minimum, you have documentation to cover all of the steps of the project.

Keeping your client assured and on board with the project is the best way to manage their expectations when it comes to the project.

Marketing, more than any other industry, requires you to be on your toes. In the blink of an eye, your competitor can announce a new product, offer lower prices, or even attempt a smear campaign against your company. When this happens, a marketing department needs to act fast. As a marketing consultant, you are the one the company will turn to when a campaign needs to be shifted mid stream, or even if an entirely new campaign needs to be created in a hurry.

These diversions from the norm are commonly referred to as scope changes. Managing and implementing scope changes are a vital part of a company’s success, not just in marketing, but in every subdivision of a company. A smart marketing consultant will understand that not every proposed change should be implemented into the project, but they shouldn’t be so narrow-minded as to shoot down every suggestion that crosses their desk. A healthy balance is the first step to marketing success, as is a plan to implement the project changes seamlessly into the everyday operations.

As a marketing consultant, you should have a process for evaluating proposed changes to determine if they are part of the project. Marketing consultants might not have final say on what gets approved, so these ideas must be presented to a board or panel often times. Once approved, it is the job of the marketing consultant to work the new project into the existing operations without going over budget or over time constraints. Knowing your available resources, both monetarily and labor-specific will go a long way to ensuring that the project remains successful.

For more tips and resources for marketing consultants, visit the TechInsurance Small Business Center.