As a project manager, some of the first things you learn is to raise risks, document everything and escalate issues where required.
Now not everybody understands this, and sometimes you need to almost “educate” your client in a way as to how their project will be managed and how these “difficult” items will be handled.
You will have to be clear about how you or your company will run a project and you will have to almost map out the delivery process at the beginning of the initiation stages in order to save yourself a lot of potential discomfort later.
One way to do this, is to sit your client down and take them through the different scenario’s and agree on the outcomes and how risks, issues, and escalation will work on this project – don’t worry if you tweak your processes a bit in order to fit in with how your client would like to work, as long as you stick to and agree on the basic principals that risks will be raised, issues will be escalated, and all this will be tracked regularly and communicated to all stakeholders.
What happens a lot of the time is that the project manager actually does not take some time upfront to explain how the difficult conversations will work and then when the situations arise, he/she gets a ton of resistance from the stakeholders, and this inevitably spirals out of control to such an extent that you have an unhappy client that feels that you are just escalating for the sake of escalating and to get them in to trouble, which is not what you need if you want to deliver projects successfully.
Another item to remember is to also raise issues and risks early on rather than waiting. A mistake that a lot of us make is to be afraid of the difficult conversations, and we then end up putting them off until we are forced to have them and then, unfortunately, it is too late and the proverbial shit has hit the fan.
So, start your project on the right foot and get all the difficult conversations out of the way in the beginning. Raise issues and risks early on and ensure that your client understands why risks and issues are raised and escalated, and how the process will work and you will deliver your project seamlessly and effortlessly.
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