Confident and Secure Clients: Good Communication

There are at least 2 things we need to have when we work as consultant in our IT consulting business.

• deliver the agreed tasks
• while the project is still going on we must give the client enough secure feeling that the tasks not yet accomplished will be accomplished

As a technical people, we tend to focus on the first point and forget the second one. The second one suppose to be the job of project managers, business owners, etc. But as you become more of senior members of the consultants, you will eventually be expected to provide the second thing more than the first one. The first one should be done by juniors under your supervision. You are in the project to help the juniors deliver the tasks; hence in some way give the client the feeling of security.

I am in a project where we found that the client's project manager is so worry that we will be dragging the schedule far behind. What I perceive as 'lacking confidence'. Then they will run after the management to give pressure to the project management, which in turn will try to push or motivate the team. Sometimes it just isn't working. Yes, I know that there are some tasks that needs directions, motivations and pressures. But I would also like to assert that 'lacking confidence' should not be the major driving force of doing this.

Some part of the delays are caused by the customers and some by us (vendors). But I know that somehow we also didn't feed them with enough information to give them more secure feeling on the completion of this project. That we have missed within last 2 weeks. We don't update the issue tracker very often. Sometimes they just feel that the response time is very bad. There were so many pending issues, if only that our developers care to take 1 hour a day to update the issues, there wouldn't be so much pending issues during the weekly meeting.

What I wanted to highlight today is :
Good communication is part of our consulting job. We should not neglect providing the client with reasons why they still trust us to accomplish the tasks. Failure in providing this for a long period of time will have greater impact on good will as well as financial matters.
Although we are technical people, we are part of the bigger team which in turn has to deliver and to maintain our customer's trust and secure feeling.