Humanize Your Project Development with Transparency While Improving Productivity

Have you ever experienced a disconnect with your clients when developing their marketing project? Did they have an understanding of one vision while you worked on another?

This article to offer a step-by-step process of humanizing your project development process with your clients through transparency and collaboration.

A goal of transparency is positive collaboration over a project’s life cycle and through to delivery – and to have the best possible experience getting there. It’s always a challenge to bring together all the different moving parts and to increase the transparency of an organization for its clients. By creating a transparent flow of information, businesses are able to increase both communication and expectations with clients, improve client relations, and ultimately, increase productivity and growth.

Writing out each of the steps in a project plan can be time-consuming, but clear expectations and boundaries around your process make the project go more smoothly, and keep the business relationship worthwhile for everyone.

Using transparent tools with your team: Project management software will support a more transparent workflow. Team members need visibility into each other’s activities in order to see how other tasks affect their own activity. Project management software will show you the status of everyone involved in your project for assigned tasks.

Transparency aside, by optimizing the right software, you should be able to identify future bottlenecks and make adjustments to avoid them. This allows for a more informed project proposal for future prospects.

Transparency with your customer: Transparency with customers is the trickiest kind of all. Your customer’s biggest concern is that their project is completed on time and on budget. An efficient project management system allows your clients an opportunity to ascertain when milestones are being met. This is also what matters most. If you fail to meet agreed deadlines, your customer will be upset. If you can, use your project management software to share project timelines, plans, task lists, competed documents and the current status of team members and tasks on your customer’s project.

Word of caution: don’t routinely share drafts of documents, your team’s commentary on the client or any general grousing.

Direct communication: It is well known and understood that the fewer intermediaries or outsources involved, the greater the chance of delivering what the client wants.. What better way then than liaising directly with the language expert, (your client), to clarify any doubts or questions?

• Be willing to say NO

  In many cases, clients ask us to do things that our experience tells us that in doing so will far from contribute to the project and potentially cause consumers to run away. Take the time to understand why your client is asking you to do a particular task. Understand their rationale and the value they see in their unusual request and then let them know your reasons against it. Collaborate to find another solution or compromise. This is healthy. Don’t just say “yes” because the client is always right. You are the expert in your industry. You have a better understanding of your industry ‘best practices’ and this is why your client hired you in the first place.

• Be willing to say YES

  Say yes to the jobs that may require you to work harder. The client will be grateful. Specially in those cases when it is important for the client to have this particular feature deployed, as it will lead to growth opportunities. Doing this will make you more valuable in your clients eyes, so don’t be afraid to embrace these opportunities. Don’t take this concept as routine business practices, but pushing yourself a little bit every once in a while is a great opportunity to expand your services offered. Often we are asked to develop a feature, a call to action, or an element that falls outside the scope of work. Sometimes these requests have forced us to research new and old technologies to fulfill such requests.  During the process, we obtain additional knowledge to add to our expanding portfolio. Therefore,  the payoff to go outside your existing capabilities range is twofold.