This is another lesson I learnt the hard way.  Being new to project management, I decided to copy what other project managers were doing around me.  At that time, the general trend was to give our Customer the least information that was necessary for each milestone.  In fact, that is not completely true.  We were usually rushing to get the documentation for development milestones, so the immediate solution was to reduce the quantity and quality of the information provided.  Back then it didn’t look that bad… The customer is happy because we are on time and we reduce development time because we don’t have to produce as much documentation.

We were quite wrong!  We didn’t have our design documentation ready not because we didn’t have time to write it down, but because we hadn’t analysed our design thoroughly.  And having a design review without a clear idea of your design is a bad idea! Our customer didn’t review our documentation in depth so they didn’t object to the level of detail.  So we passed the review, which lead to the disaster, because we started working in a direction that was different to what our customer expected.  The result was similar to working without planning.

So the lesson we learnt was clear:

• Identify your stakeholders
• Find out what they expect
• Manage the misalignments between stakeholders’ expectations and project scope or goals

Expectations management is a continuous job.  The Project Manager has to know the direction of his project and communicate it to all the stakeholders.  There will be moments where expectations are much bigger than what we plan to deliver, and it is highly important to address this issues as soon as possible and find an agreement.  Otherwise, what we would do is postpone a problem to the end of the project, when there is no reaction time.

I just had an example of bad communication with our customer.  There was luckily a happy ending and I hope I learned from it and not make the same mistake in the future.

We are working with our Customer in a project within a big programme.  This programme has been delayed due to external reasons and both our customer and ourselves are suffering the consequences.
A few months ago, when a big delay was declared, we tried to find a way forward that would be beneficial for our customer and for us.  We reached the final agreement during a telephone conversation.  We hadn’t had any communication problems before, so no one bothered to write down the minutes of the conversation, and that was the MISTAKE!

Today we found out that that day we had understood similar but different things.  Luckily we have been able to find a solution, but I know this could have caused a delay of several months for our project.

Communication has two processes:

• Sending the message
• Making sure the recipient of the message has the same understanding as you

So the lesson today was to never forget the second point, even when it seems unnecessary.