Ways you can coordinate your work with the client’s needs

Every business in the world is built upon the customers that they serve. It doesn’t matter what industry you work in or what particular job that you do, inevitably your job boils down to providing some kind of service or product to your clients and delivering it with all of the professionalism and care that the work itself demands. It doesn’t matter whether you are a carpenter making chairs or an executive at a marketing firm, your clients are at the end of the day why you are working at all. Particularly in office professions there has been an attitude shift in recent year regarding exactly how clients should be dealt with and how much say they should have during a project or service’s lifespan or duration and this has led to a new position that has been created in the past 20 years or so and that is the Project Manager.

The Project Manager’s responsibilities mainly are that of liaising with clients and letting them know the status of any work that has been commissioned for them, to receive feedback and set expectations of the work as it stands and implement any changes that they may have into the work itself. As you can imagine it’s an important responsibility for most office based industries and they can be found helping any number of industries, from logistics to marketing and web design. So maybe you are stepping into a role like this and would like some pointers on how to easily coordinate the work that you and your team are doing with those who commissioned it. Well hopefully in this article we can give you a few pointers on exactly how to do that.

Ask for simplified and bullet pointed changes and editing

It’s going to be hard enough to capture exactly what vision your client has for the work that you will be completing for, however, what will undoubtedly make this process harder is if the editing and changes that they want made to the work itself are placed in a jumbled and hard to read email in which they excessively describe what they want with no real organization for you to follow through with implementing them in a structured way. So it can be a great help to ask your client to work with you when coordinating changes between yourselves and them in order to be able to get what it is that they want put into the work quickly and efficiently without holding up the turnaround time of the delivery of the work itself.

One of the easiest to explain and convenient ways to do this is to politely ask them if they could in future put all changes into an easy to read bullet point style in any correspondence regarding changes to the work that they might have. Asking them to also put the changes to various different aspects or elements of the work under their own heading to easily be able to call up that work and discuss with your team how the proposed changes will need to be implemented to the particular piece of work indicated by the client. Asking to do this not only gets the work done efficiently but it also teaches the client how to effectively communicate with service provider, increasing your perceived expertise and gratitude of said client.

Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a program developed by Microsoft used for the sole purpose of liaising about specific aspects of the work with the client, you and the rest of your team, without inconveniencing anybody, a phone or even video conference can be established and different media can be shared between yourselves and the client. This kind of program is known in the industry as a PMS and as well as liaising with clients in a way that is very clear and easily to note down their recommendations, it also serves a few other tasks internally.

For a start, it allows you to assign both resources onto a particular task as defined by either what is needed or what the client wants. It can also be used to divide the work as a whole into easily manageable tasks that you can then assign to the appropriate team member. Thanks for taking the time to read this article, please click the following link to learn more about Microsoft Project raining and workshops.