Transparent Project Management

Building effective partnership is closely connected with one of the basic and well known rules of business: you should learn what your clients really need (or help them determine their need) – and do your best to follow their interests and expectations when offering them corresponding products or services. Of course, understanding your customers is of vital significance at the stage of pre project negotiations. But aren't we often loosing this perspective once the deal gets to the implementation phase? The key requirements remain essentially the same: you should be able to listen to your vis-􀀂-vis and really understand them, as well as to be open and responsive when you have already started co-operating.Thus, the magic word of constructive communication between service provider and customer is TRANSPARENCY. So, what does transparency actually mean in terms of modern project management? 1. Tasks setting and estimation (a) Clear scope: correspondence to Company's skills and competencies (b) Structure: hierarchy and links (c) Timeline: fixed, realistic, but flexible – within evaluated amount of work hours (according to risk estimation) 2. Completeness and wholeness (a) The complete project management process includes post-project support and analysis – as well as updates or debugging, if necessary. (b) Wholeness means that the project has no “black holes” Avoid gathering all documents and data in a stressful manner on the stage of the final report (unfortunately it still often happens so in practice). In the perfect case scenario your communication program will save all the project communication for you, so that it is all documented on the spot and you can trace it easily. 3. Visibility of all project activities Meaning that for knowing what page you are on, a project manager should see and control the tasks progress as well as the group (or an individual participant) progress. 4. Daily / weekly project reports for each task Let's imagine the usual situation: you set the project plan, and defined the milestones and assigned the tasks within the project team. Now, you can wait for the interim reports.or ask about the progress every day. Or you can start using the system, where all project participants have to report their job every day, and where you can track the progress daily. The last option is the way to go. The issue of progress and efficiency tracking we emphasize as especially important for the project transparency. 5. Efficiency and workload tracking per each project participant Those help you determine if you need additional resources for each particular task, or if you could re-allocate some project participants to different tasks. Efficiency tracking also let's a manager see if project participants are on track with the tasks assigned, and if the project time-line is observed. 6.Openness. It is the real result of all transparency-oriented measures. Frank and as a result cooperative project atmosphere could be named one of the key factors for effective and constructive team work. It makes real value for topexecutives and managers in charge at the customer side. Discussed components are of even greater significance in the case of big projects, where participation of several teams (and remote coordination of their work) is expected.