It is quite reasonable to inform all participants that the customer will adequately perceive and perhaps even encourage timely warning of possible deadline delays and other problems.
Remote work presents new challenges. Contractors are far from the customer, now you can not look them inquisitively in the eyes to assess how much they themselves believe in the named deadlines. Weekly phone calls, our favorite management tool, do not give us a feeling of sufficient control. And there is no assurance that deadlines will be met. First, every week, the project manager cheerfully reports that everything is going according to plan, and then suddenly without a declaration of war it turns out that the deadline has already been broken.
An experienced customer, of course, is able to suspect something wrong at an earlier stage, based on body language and uncertainty of speech of the manager, but for this you need personal contact. So what to do? Let’s rack our brains together.
My order, my rules.
The one who pays is the one who makes the rules. So let’s not be lazy to set them. It is quite reasonable to inform all participants, that the customer will adequately perceive and perhaps even encourage for the timely warning of possible deadlines and other problems. Justified, of course, by some signals and changes inside or outside the project, even if intuitively.
It is quite logical to explain to all project participants that advance warning will allow risk management, to take corrective actions. And most importantly, it puts all project participants on the same side of the barricades: “all together against the problem,” rather than “customer against performers trying to justify failure to meet deadlines.
On the contrary, draconian sanctions can be imposed for failure to meet deadlines and the onset of problems without early warning. If they tried to prevent the failure, but could not, it happens. But if you didn’t even try because you didn’t know and didn’t anticipate, that’s a shame.
Operational Metrics.
Ours is an age that demands ever more rapid reactions, more rapid management decisions. Our age demands more and more rapid response, more rapid management decisions. Monitoring the progress of a project at weekly meetings is already too infrequent. But it is also impossible to spend a lot of time. So, we need some indicators, simple but eloquent indicators that give signals on time. Reducing the project buffer, if you are a Goldratt fan, or a trivial combustion chart will allow you to keep your hand on the pulse.
Better yet, set up a “red light” that will light up when the metric deviates from the design metric, prompting the customer and the project team to react in a hurry.
What’s next
And then the main thing is not to stop. Rigidly fixed rules and indicators eventually cease to work. This means that at the end of each incident, problem or even just an undesirable phenomenon it is necessary to adjust the rules, supplement the indicators and look for other solutions.
And also – do not lie to yourself. By admitting our mistakes, we give ourselves a chance to correct them. As long as we are wrong and correct, we are not only living, but also developing.