5 Communication guidelines for Support Projects

Communication management is a central part of Project management. It connects all other management activities and drives the project for success. I would like to share few processes here for managing communications for T&M type accounts, and support projects.

Build and Share your communication plans: your communication plan should have support availability times – in your Offshore and Onsite. Clearly state whom to communicate for what type of requirements. Give emails, and mobile numbers of important support contacts. Define an escalation matrix. Share your plan with all your stakeholders.

Respond to Emails: This should happen as early as possible. If you have a blackberry – and you can access it in all your “available times” – use it. Send a response for appreciations, Issues, Suggestions, change requests – everything. If you access your office works, only from office PC – Let this work be the first thing in the morning. Clients always expect a response for his Issues – mainly in T&M accounts. At least respond them with a message “we understood – we are working on it” – or “need clarification” if you are not sure about what they are asking for.

Issue Log and Reports: Maintain an Issue Log document (A simple excel sheet will be fine) – and record all the issues and status updates. Update them into your project plan daily/weekly basis. Add Issue Log status information in your weekly status reports – this helps the clients to understand the progress and avoids unnecessary escalations.

Clarifications – Set call: Whenever you need a clarification for the issues or change requests, set a “request for conf call” or direct meeting as early as possible. Emails are fine for asking clarifications, but talking will provide more inputs and sometimes, the clients Issue/Change request will become simple than what you expected. Circulate the minutes of meeting after each discussion, to avoid misunderstandings. Action items should be mentioned in your minutes of meeting document and the status of them should be updated in weekly status reports.

Expert teams: Build an expert team, not only for technical support but also for domain related queries and to provide suggestions for improving the requirement. A detail functional flow model will be helpful to understand change requests or Issues raised by the clients. Introduce your expert team members to clients – this helps the client to get a confident about your background and quality of delivery.

T&M (Time and Material) is the business model for mostly support projects and maintenance projects. A good communication management will improve the quality of service with less escalation.