Ideally we glide through our projects with happy customers and arrive at deployment ready to shake hands and say goodbye…all on good terms.  Reality, though, is often something altogether different. 

I'd like to say I never experience customer frustrations on any of my projects, but the truth is I've experienced some degree of customer frustration on nearly every project at some point during the process.  It may be a big issue or it may be something miniscule, but at some point it usually happens.
 
Customer frustrations can arise from any one of a number of things.  From unanticipated change orders, to error-filled deliverables, to rude project team members, to project budget issues, to just conflicting personalities. 

Anything – literally – can set it off and it may not be a showstopper, but it should be addressed.  The potential issues can be endless – so I definitely can't address all the possibilities here.  But we can discuss a few possible proactive or responsive measures we can take to try to alleviate customer frustrations if we sense that things aren't going as well as hoped…at least from the customer's point of view….
 

Step up communication practices
 
Effective, efficient, and timely communication remains, in my mind, the number one responsibility of the project manager.  All task assignments, all feedback, all customer interaction, all issues resolution, and all collaboration in general, begins and ends with good communication. 

In fact, with more than 50% of all projects failing, one survey showed that project managers cite 'poor communication' as the second biggest contributor to project failure – right behind 'bad or incomplete requirements.'
 
If a failure point at the beginning of the project was to skip the creation of a project communications plan and now you're seeing communication breakdown, it may be the right time to go back and create the plan so everyone has the same communication expectations going forward for the rest of the project.

 
Revisit weak areas
 
There may be weak areas of the project that are causing the customer concern like how risk is being handled or possibly the delivery of error-prone deliverables.  Revisit those weak areas and add more effort where needed.

For example, begin reviewing risk topics and issues regularly on a weekly basis as part of the weekly status call or meeting with the customer.  If deliverables have been a problem area, incorporate peer reviews on every future deliverable.  Having the entire team review every deliverable will greatly reduce the likelihood of presenting the customer with a document or deliverable with issues or errors.
 
 
React to team member concerns
 
If the customer is frustrated with someone on the team, meet with the customer to find out why, meet with the team member to work out some corrective action, and then jointly meet with the customer to discuss. 

Personnel issues rarely work themselves out on their own and if there is friction between the customer and one of your team members it may not even be obvious to your team member.  Bring it to the forefront and take the necessary corrective action BEFORE your customer has to request a replacement.  If you let it get to that point, then your leadership will definitely be called into question as well.

 
Circle back
 
If necessary, go back to the kickoff presentation and notes to analyze where you are vs. where you should be in terms of process and promises and assumptions.  It's never too late to try to get the project back on track and make the customer feel comfortable again. 

It's possible that you discussed processes, actions and policies that would be implemented or followed and they never happened or were never implemented.  If that is the case, it may be frustration point for the customer to see that it was an expectation that was never fulfilled.  Often the customer sees it as something they paid for but never received. 

 
Call for input
 
Customer satisfaction is one of the three key indicators of project success, so responding to and resolving customer frustration should always be a top priority.  When you've experienced customer frustration, how have you responded?  What actions have you taken to resolve these issues?  What general approaches have worked the best for you?  Thanks – we'd love to see your feedback!
 

Keeping the project budget in line is one of the most difficult things that a project manager does – and yet it is a huge factor in determining the overall success of the project when the engagement winds down.

The goal is to keep it in line throughout and avoid falling into emergency mode at any point with a huge budget overrun that you have to either fix or find yourself at the brink of project shutdown.
 
Through my experience, I've found that the following three processes are extremely helpful to me as I try to keep my project budgets in check on the multiple projects I'm usually managing at any given point in time. Project managers are busy with many things beyond managing the budget on our plate.

Developing good processes and habits will help you significantly reduce the likelihood that your project budget will turn into a catastrophe.  Let's review each of the three ways to minimize your project budget exposure more closely….

 
Review and revise the project budget at least weekly 

The first thing you can do to protect your project budget is probably the easiest thing you can do and it is definitely the least invasive thing you can do.  All it requires is you – and the proper information provided to you on a weekly basis. 

Get weekly information from Accounting concerning the charges to your project and revise your information diligently every week. This may seem simple…even mundane.  But it always amazes me how many project managers get lazy and let this slide for a week or two and then eventually longer.  "Hey, it wasn't a problem three weeks ago and nothing significant has happened on the project so why should my budget be in jeopardy now?" 
 
Well, it's amazing how the little things build up – and they can build up fast.  Stay on top of the budget – don't let a week go by without comparing forecast to actuals and re-forecasting, if necessary. It's much easier to fix a 10% budget overrun now before it gets out of control than it is to fix a 40% budget overrun a month from now after it is already out of control.

And which one is management going to be more pleased about hearing?  Which one will the customer be more understanding of and flexible in working with you on?
 

Make your project budget high profile

This is also a fairly easy one and it has worked extremely well for me.  And if you're organization is a matrix organization with everyone working on multiple projects at once, even better.  Here's the scenario….
 
You are a project manager running five projects at once. Each of your technical team members are on – on average – three different projects at the same time.  And let's remember that – in all honesty – 80-90% of all employees calculate their project charges for the week at the last minute, usually on Friday. 

Very few accurately document their time during each workday or at the end of the day.  And we all remember most of what we did each week … but there's always that four or five hours that we really can't pinpoint exactly what we were doing.  We know we worked 50 hours this week, but can only accurately account for 45 of them.  They have to go somewhere.  Where do they go? They go to the project that they feel those hours will be least noticed in.  And that is usually the project that those personnel know is not being monitored closely. 
 
So don't let that be your project.  Make sure your team members know you're watching the project budget – and the hours that they charge to it – like a hawk. Discuss the budget with them at every weekly internal team meeting and give them a status update on how the project budget is standing up to the original forecast.  Share your concerns with them. 

Periodically question them on charges just to keep them on their toes. Don't be accusing, just ask them questions about the charges and the work that was being performed.  If they know you're that aware, it's highly unlikely that any of your projects will be recipients of the 'grey' hours at the end of each work week.
 

Manage scope closely

This is probably the hardest one to do and can have the most devastating affect on the project budget.  The problem here can be two fold. 

You have the issue of managing the project scope from your project manager perspective and negotiating changes and change orders with the customer.  But you also have the task of managing your project team members closely as they work with the customer. 
 
On at least a third of my projects I've run across potential scope issues through discussions I've had with my project team members who were in close communication with the customer. They tend to develop a relationship with the customer and then you have the ego trip issue of your developer 'knowing' they can do anything quickly and easily.

The customer makes a small request, your developer thinks it will be no problem to incorporate this 'new' request quickly and you end up having a developer spend a few hours – which can mean a few thousand dollars - of your precious project budget on a customer request that is likely beyond the original scope of the project. 
 
None of this was malicious or even on purpose – they were just helping out the customer on a small request. Inform your team, warn them of these situations, and then ask them about their customer interactions and any requests that may be coming their way when you meet with them internally on a weekly basis.


 
Call for feedback
 
Let's hear from our readers.  What budget issues have you experienced?  Do you find it hard, at times, to rein your team in when trying to keep costs down.  What steps do you take to keep your project budget from getting out of hand?

How can you achieve customer service so fine that clients actually comment on it and spread the word about your company? Learn from the benchmark experiences of other companies, and benefit from the latest technologies to facilitate your work.

123 EDI, a leading provider of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), has been offering a variety of robust, cost-effective EDI solutions since 1991. Projects of 123 EDI are typically complex and require coordination between sales, accounting and programming departments to ensure the company meets and even exceeds customers' expectations.

According to Bernie Murciano, President at 123 EDI, the following principles, supported by Wrike's features, help to achieve top-notch customer service:

Attention to detail
Being thorough in performing clients' requests, minding the details, no matter how small they are, is crucial on the road to customer satisfaction. But can you take the load of remembering too many things off your brain and still deliver everything and more to your clients?

Yes, you can! Wrike stores all the short-term and long-term commitments of 123 EDI, providing "a view of the big picture without losing sight of the many details" says Bernie. Thus, 123 EDI stays ahead of the game and ensures that even minor customer needs are not overlooked. "Positive customer feedback doubled in a couple of months after we adopted Wrike," shares Bernie.

Seamless collaboration
To achieve excellent customer service, a unified effort of all the organizational departments is required. 123 EDI chose Wrike for teamwork with its enhanced collaboration features: real-time discussions, handy ways to follow tasks, and a cross-project newsfeed to track progress with ease.

What makes Wrike especially convenient for collaboration is easy data-sharing on project progress with everyone involved. If you wish to connect remote teams, external partners and clients to the project, you can easily do so – the number of external viewers is unlimited.  Bernie confirms: "Wrike's user-friendly web application keeps everyone on the same page."

Commitment to timelines
When you deliver a project on time, customers appreciate it and come back for more. With Wrike's automatic reminders about tasks and updates, you never miss a deadline.

Scheduling tasks is simple and can be done from list, table and timeline views in real time. Bernie Murciano values this ability "to more effectively prioritize tasks by revising due dates." Thus, 123 EDI quickly reacts to the ever-changing business conditions, so that no customer is disappointed by a missed deadline. 

Now that you know Bernie's opinion on what's crucial for improving customer service, we'd love to hear about your experiences! If you wish to share your stories about how Wrike's implementation helped you to tackle project or business management challenges, you are very welcome to do so! Contact us at support@team.wrike.com.

Smaller organizations and startups are great to work in and consult for as they exude enthusiasm and a do-whatever-it-takes attitude.  It's especially appealing to an independent IT consultant like me who is basically a small/startup type organization as well…doing whatever it takes to succeed, market myself, get by... etc. The fit is good.

One thing I've noticed about smaller organizations, though, is that beneath that layer of enthusiasm lies a company in need.  They often lack structure, but that may not really be their primary need.  Indeed, too much structure will stifle the efforts of those entrepreneurial spirits running the show at a smaller, startup-type company.  But they are almost always in need of more efficient processes and some organization.  Their wins are often coming by luck, because they're too busy innovating and meeting growing customer demands to actually track what's working and repeating those steps again.

Setting the stage

So, as a project manager or incoming consultant, the best thing you can offer to a smaller organization is an injection of project management best practices.  How you do that and what exactly those best practices are may indeed be somewhat dependent on the organization, the industry, and the state of the projects that are in progress or ready to start.  From my past experience, what I've found these organizations need quickly are:

Customer education.  Sit down with each customer for the small organization and explain what changes will and are being made to make their projects more successful and the PM oversight more accountable.

Injection of successful project management processes.  Next, rollout PM best practices within the organization and on the many projects being executed.  This likely will involve some teaching and learning and it will definitely take some refinement over time.  Eventually it will be second nature as project successes become more frequent with more PM structure.

Project management oversight of the development process.  To further ensure a tighter ship and more successful PM practice, I highly recommend initially having heavy oversight of the development team by project management.  I've seen it work in smaller startup-type situations…I've made it work personally in smaller startup-type situations.  When you must inject better processes and you must turn projects around quickly, it may be your only choice.

The best practices

We've discussed some quick actions to take to roll out best practices into a small organization where they were previously needed but lacking.  Now let's consider what those best practices should be for the small startup-types...

Consistent project status reporting.  Come up with a fairly standard project status report and stick to it.  Include project status, key dates, key tasks and assignments and outstanding issues.  Include all key information for both your team and your customer and provide it on a weekly basis to every stakeholder on the project.

Consistent project status meetings.  Hold weekly meetings with your team and customer on the project.  Adhoc meetings are ok and often necessary, but relying on them all the time can be annoying and can lead to decreased attendance and, subsequently, decreased effectiveness.

Detailed budget management.  Manage the project budget tightly.  Too many PMs shoot from the hip in small organizations because they're given too much freedom.  And then they wonder why the project failed because it went way over budget. A budget that is watched carefully, reforecasted consistently, and reported on relentlessly can never get too far out of hand.  Don't let the financials be the reason why your project failed.

Use of a collaborative project management tool.  I highly recommend going web-based for a project management tool, but it's imperative that it be a collaborative tool.  In a smaller organization like the ones we're discussing, everyone is wearing multiple hats and often working long hours.  They also may be very decentralized – they may often be very geographically dispersed.  Many small organizations don't even have a headquarters yet.  So a powerful, inexpensive, and web-based project management tool that allows the team to gather, share documents, update tasks, etc. on their own without the obligation of running every piece of information through a central PM figure will ensure that the project is well-managed in real time.

Summary
While there's no way to guarantee project success in any organization – big or small - no matter what you do, utilizing PM best practices will always provide some level of benefit to the projects being managed and the organization as a whole.  Communication is improved, customers are more comfortable during the engagement, and the project staff is usually able to work more cohesively as a unit focused on the overall goals of the project.  Injecting PM best practices into a newer, smaller, growing organization will help that organization retain customers and develop into a mature organization that can regularly and successfully deliver on projects in the future.

Despite the global quest for work-life balance, many people still regularly work over the weekend and don't use all of their vacation days. This in turn causes them to be overwhelmed, overworked and laboring in overtime... So if you dream about a 25th hour in the day to be fully productive and dedicate some time for yourself, we've got something for you! Since having an extra hour in the day is still impossible, we decided to give you some tips on how to work on things smarter. Here's a neat infographic with tips for saving heaps of time for leisure (click on the preview image below to see the full infographic)!


 
Summary of the 7 key points:

1. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. In other words, immediately deal with tasks that take less than 2 minutes to complete. Are you sure all such tasks from your backlog in Wrike are done?
 
2. Business before pleasure. At work, try to fight off tempting distractions like Facebook. Spend working time productively and use your weekend for the fun, not work! To boost your productivity, choose a professional system. And with Wrike, professional doesn't mean boring! Wrike is as easy and attractive as using your familiar social networks.
 
3. It's not the hours you put in, but rather what you put into these hours. So tackle the most important and urgent tasks first. Timely prioritization of your tasks in Wrike will let you and your team always keep the focus on the highest-priority tasks.
 
4. When scheduling a project, remember to leave contingency time to deal with the unexpected. This way you can ensure you'll be on time and fulfill your commitments. If you need to reschedule a task or the entire project, it's as easy as a mouse motion in Wrike. 
 
5. Is multitasking productive? The latest research shows that doing several things at once lowers your IQ score by 10 points! So actually devoting all of your attention and effort to one concrete task is much more cost-efficient, as it saves you time otherwise wasted on switching between different activities.
 
6. Single-handed success doesn't exist. Divide your tasks into small, actionable items and then delegate them to achieve more together with your team. In Wrike, it's a snap to assign multiple tasks, if needed. You can even do it right from your e-mail inbox!
 
7. Spare your mind for creative work, letting a reliable and easily accessible system remember all the tasks for you. Wrike helps to handle thousands of tasks and dozens of routine jobs, like sending reminders about due dates and notifications about the plan changes to your team. 

Have you ever wished to be saved from the pressure of looming deadlines? If so, prioritizing work is exactly what you need! Explicit and timely prioritization helps your team focus on the most important and urgent tasks, fight off distractions, and avoid deadline panic.

If you drop by our blog, you already know how easy it is to prioritize tasks in Wrike, as it takes only a mouse motion to set, adjust and share task priorities with your team. Prioritizing tasks is so crucial for efficient organization of work that it deserves more attention, and we decided to shoot a video on this topic. Our new video will help you refine your priorities and let important and urgent tasks make their way to the top of your team’s to-do lists:



Now that you know our suggestions for avoiding the stress of a hectic schedule, please tell us about your practices for defining and sharing work priorities. What tricks do you use to keep the most important and urgent tasks on the radar?

 

Wrike's dashboard conveniently gathers the most important tasks from across the workspace: tasks planned for today and this week, overdue tasks, etc. Thanks to the new custom dashboard widgets feature, you can now create your own widgets for any type of task. 

For instance, you may want to create a widget for your team's tasks for the current week, a widget for all your overdue tasks within a particular project, and a widget for all your overdue tasks for today. There are numerous options, so now let's see how simple it is to create your own widgets in Wrike.

Let's say you work on multiple projects with numerous tasks, and you need to focus on overdue tasks and today's tasks from one of the projects. Go to the project folder and filter the tasks assigned to you (1), overdue tasks and today's tasks by checking the appropriate boxes (2). If you want to include the tasks from subfolders into your widget, press the "Descendants" button (3). You may want to see the tasks you should be focusing on first at the top of the list, so you can sort the tasks by priority (4) and prioritize this list by dragging the most important tasks to the top. After that, just click on the widget icon in the upper right-hand corner of the filters panel (5), give your new widget a name and add it to the dashboard. That's it! You can now quickly access the tasks that meet your criteria from your dashboard. 


 
Wrike's new custom widgets are very useful if you need to:

• Monitor the state of a specific project.
• Watch the tasks of a particular person or a team.
• View overdue tasks and today's tasks in one list.
• And much more!

For your convenience, you can adjust the widgets' positions on the dashboard, dragging them to the desired place (1) or deleting unnecessary widgets (2) to give more space to the remaining ones. If you need to quickly switch from a widget to the task list, press the small "expand" button (3). You'll be taken to the respective folder with the tasks filtered according to your widget's settings. 

Go forth and create your own widgets to gather the tasks you need in one spot. We'll be glad to know how new custom widgets help you in your work, so you are welcome to share your practices in the comments!

Imagine your marketing department is going to run a customer satisfaction survey. To have quick access to this task, you may want to put it into several categories, like "Surveys", "Favorites" and "Approved." Wonder how you can do it in Wrike?

Create and attribute multiple tags to a task

Thanks to Wrike’s unique flexibility, there is no need to squeeze all your tasks into the frames of a particular project. Instead, there is a slick way to categorize things multiple ways. Simply create an unlimited number of tags and attribute as many of them to a task as you need.

The function of tags is assigned to folder names in Wrike. So to tag a task, just create a folder with the corresponding title and then drag it from the folder tree onto a task. That’s it: the folder name becomes the task’s tag. The task also gets included in this folder and shared with the team members with whom the folder is shared.

All of the task’s tags are listed under its title. In our example, the tags "Surveys," "Favorites" and "Approved" will appear under the "Customer Satisfaction Survey" task. To see all tasks in the category, just click on the appropriate tag, so tasks get displayed in the task list.

Change and remove tags

As you work with the task, the set of attributed tags might need an edit. It can be easily done in the “Included in” field in the task description. To add more tags to the task right there, click on any tag and type the folder name in the entry field that appears.

Removing a tag from a task also takes a matter of seconds: click on the tag name and then click on X near it or hit “Delete” on your keyboard. In case you need to delete all the tags, click on the X to the right of the tag list and that’s it!

Build neat folder structure by tagging folders

Just as easily, tagging folders will help you structure your data. For example, if you create a "Banner ideas" folder, you may tag it with "Ideas" and "Marketing" by typing the corresponding folder names in the "Included in" field. After tagging, "Banner ideas" becomes a subfolder of both "Ideas" and "Marketing" and gets shared with all team members that have access to these two folders.

Tagging may be efficiently used in many cases. For example, tags come in very handy when you need to apply custom statuses to tasks, so you may want to create tags called "waiting for approval," "approved," "rejected" and "pending."  Or you may categorize your tasks by the action required to complete them: "call," "e-mail," "read," "brainstorm," etc. Use tags to mark the stages of your product life-cycle or the development phases of software release versions. As you see, there are no hard-and-fast rules in tagging your tasks, so feel free to create tags for everything you need! And don’t forget about the "Favorites" tag to bring your most important tasks together.