How Project Managers Manage Project Delivery on Time During COVID-19?
- Mrugesh
- Aug 11, 2020
- 4 min read
The pandemic of Corona Virus (COVID-19), as advised by the World Health Organization, has had a major effect on businesses around the world. With the tremendous loss of life and the company each day, more and more countries are being affected.
Homework – Operating Remotely
Smart step in crisis management and the default go-to step. It is the only treatment for avoidance!
These corporate companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Google, etc. have been asking their employees to work from home.
It sounds very simple and relaxed working from home. And even if supported by robust remote tools for project management & collaboration.
Rather than a comfortable and quiet space within the boundaries of your home, you need a collaboration platform allowed by SaaS that
Unites your team
Permits smooth contact
Centralizes all lines of communication
Enables successful communication in real-time
Keeps your job intact, team & data
Those 5 points seem fairly straight forward on the face of it.
Think deeper and consider the everyday difficulties you face in accomplishing only these 5 things!
Also, count the hours you spent on your workday
Organize your duties
Contacting interested parties
Works together with the manager
Sharing all the feedback with the whole project team meaningfully
Add the fact you 're not in the same work as your manager now! And to quadruple the problems.
And let us now take a look at the main steps you should take to destroy any customer frustration and effectively execute your projects.
1. Share Your Proposal
Share the remote job plans upfront with the customers. Let them know the extent of that.
Leave no space for misunderstanding and share specific details about points of contact, timings, main staff information, etc.
If there's a SPOC shift in the way they've been logging / reporting problems – clarify how they can still do it easily. If any, inform changes to the support model.
On the other hand, if all is perfect and the changes are not apparent to them, drop a note saying, "We 're running a business as usual and more than ever available!"
2. Set The Standards Correctly-Clarity About Slas Help
Urgent times call for urgent action. Verify that all of your customers are aware of any changes to your SLAs service (both response and resolution).
Understand that if the service wasn't that important, the clients wouldn't pay you for service support and maintenance.
"Please be open & provide clear instructions on how to continue to obtain, address, and respond to issues."
Your customers can be dependent on your services to provide their customer service.
Don't promise what you can't offer, and keep ample room for handling any unfavorable event transition.
3. Establish a Clear Communication Strategy
Ideally, every project has one right from the start. And, under the current conditions, the number of interactions you have with your customers may need to be increased or decreased.
If it gets done by the new reporting and meeting schedule, then okay. If not, a new strategy will be chalked out and discussed with all interested parties.
"Defines how long the new program will be in place and the changes it entails. Explicitly, if applicable, regarding key personnel transition, contact numbers, email ids, and time zone discrepancies."
4. The Centralization Of All Correspondence
Thanks go to your customers for this! Explain to them the need to centralize all interactions through one centralized network into a single or an all.
Your customers may be more involved and prefer platforms such as Skype, Whatsapp, Hangouts, emails, etc. And it's best to have them all on board to your main forum for collaboration.
"A comprehensive project management framework includes ample functionality in terms of basic user task management, warnings, reminders, in-app conversations, google drive & slack integrations, and email responses, post comments, etc."
The fundamentals that keep all the communications with your clients on one board.
The advantage is that dependence will be minimized, information sharing will be simplified, and everyone can step up to take extra responsibility if the situation so demands. No blind spots here!
5. Start With A Distribution Plan
The sounds way too much. Yet recognize that under these situations, the delivery plan is a critical document to hang on to.
How about shifts? Yeah, the change will happen.
But the trick is to review, update, accept, and deliver!
The moment you enter a crisis management process, a comprehensive impact analysis would be the smart thing to do.
Identify impediments that will hinder or inhibit the production of your project.
Then phase 2, lists the mitigating activities on how you still expect to meet the production deadline or the minimum time that the customer wants to accommodate.
Exchange it with customers and other stakeholders once it's finished. Demand your ideas & finally your approvals.
Publish the revised proposal to all interested parties. And all of that can be done by getting the clients into one project management program on everything.
Put all of that together!
See, we've all used several project management & remote team collaboration tools to improve our professional lives and excel. The point is that we always neglect the importance it provides in terms of maintaining a good balance between work and life.
Despite the COVID-19 outbreak, the main objective is to remain healthy, stay indoors, and still successfully deliver projects.
To that end-
Using collaboration software to exchange current data and vital details in real-time
Stay active on your chosen platform and respond as quickly as possible to customer queries
Share job progress & status notifications using the tool's email notification functions
On-board customers will, therefore, be part of the real action and fear if any are discussed preemptively
Progress is clear to the clients and is extremely transparent. So you develop trust and faith
Fewer customer distractions because they know you 're at the top of their tasks
Finally, be cooperative with your customers and try listening to the speechless
Those were some of the most basic actions we had introduced during these extraordinary circumstances to ensure complete business continuity and effectively maintain customer relationships.
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