Client project management may be a boring phrase, but I assure you, the process is anything but boring. Projects are like living creatures. They are constantly shifting and changing as they progress, and outside forces can impact them, even ones that seem entirely unrelated. And when clients are involved, things can get even more unpredictable and chaotic. The goal of client project management is to bring order to the chaos, enabling both the project team and the client to fulfill their objectives. This article will offer valuable insights to help you achieve your goals like learning about client project time management stages, best practices, and tools.
One way to improve client project management is by using automatic time tracking software like Tackle. Our solution can help you learn about the ins and outs of client project management, so you can make the process smoother for everyone involved.
What is Client Project Management?
Client project management is the practice of actively involving clients throughout a project’s lifecycle to ensure that deliverables align with their expectations while also safeguarding your business’s efficiency and profitability. It’s about creating a structured and transparent working relationship where both parties collaborate on defining realistic outcomes, monitoring progress, and adjusting the course when needed.
PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 97% of organizations consider project management crucial to service business performance and organizational success in today’s marketplace. Effective client project management plays a vital role in retaining existing clients while attracting new ones.
The Cornerstone of Client Project Management: Understanding and Planning
Knowing your customer and their requirements can significantly assist your success, regardless of whether you have years of experience managing projects or are just getting started in business. At its core, client project management ensures that projects don’t just get completed, they get completed in a way that satisfies the client and sustains your working relationship.
This starts with a clear project management plan that outlines deliverables, responsibilities, timelines, and communication protocols. That plan acts as the shared reference point for everyone involved.
The Key Benefits of Client Project Management
Regular communication plays a critical role. From scheduled status updates to quick informal messages, staying in touch helps catch issues early, builds trust, and keeps the client engaged. It also prevents misalignment, one of the most significant risks in client-facing projects.
- Effective client project management strikes a balance between responsiveness and structure. While it’s essential to stay flexible to client needs, it’s equally important to manage expectations, keep the project team focused, and ensure deadlines and scope are respected.
- Effective client project management helps deliver successful outcomes while fostering long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. Happy clients are more likely to return, refer others, and collaborate on future work, making this a strategic function, not just a process.
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Stages of Client Project Management
An early project launch sets expectations, timelines, identifies needs, and gathers information. Before starting work, project managers will thoroughly research and plan the scope and vision for the project. This research often involves communicating with clients to gather specific project requirements.
Sometimes, stakeholders cannot articulate what they want or need, making client management essential to project success. At this stage, it’s common to create a Project Charter document. This straightforward outline covers key details about finishing the project without overwhelming project team members.
Planning: Laying Out the Path to Success
The planning phase often overlaps with the initiating stage. It’s worth mentioning separately because there is a lot of work involved. This is where you will create your project’s schedule and the statement of work.
A project manager must create a plan and divide it into tasks that are manageable by both internal team members and the client. You will add deadlines for the project, set clear milestones, and create tasks for all participants. It also includes client project work.
Facilitating Client Contributions in Project Management
Consider where your clients may need to contribute, like reviews and approvals. Think about whether your team needs something from the client to do their job. Establish realistic time frames for clients to finish the task. Ensure that you clearly communicate your expectations and that the client can easily fulfill their part.
Execution: Implementing the Client Project Plan
Once a comprehensive and precise project plan has been drafted, its implementation becomes the next step in the project execution phase. Producers will take responsibility for delivering the next stage of project completion. As a project manager, your role now shifts significantly.
- Supporting project team members as they overcome any hurdles will likely become necessary.
- As a team leader, you are responsible for overseeing all workflows and taking immediate steps should anything go wrong, be delayed, or be produced incorrectly.
- As your project advances, so will your involvement as an expert communicator.
- Regular updates from other departments, as well as your team, may be essential.
- Resolve any conflicts that may arise within your team or between customers, be they internal or external.
- Assist team members during difficult discussions or step in when needed.
Closure: Ending the Client Project on a High Note
Ensure a seamless close and off-boarding of client projects, taking great care to address any loose ends or outstanding issues, so that clients are satisfied with the results of their projects. Use this time as an opportunity to highlight the job’s positives, address concerns or suggest improvements, build healthy client relationships, and establish new contracts for future phases.
Communication, a detail-oriented work ethic, and a willingness to extend scope are crucial components of ensuring a smooth closure and off-boarding phase, which ultimately increases the chances of winning future contracts.
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17 Best Practices and Tips for Managing Client Projects
1. Communicate Openly with Everyone Involved
Every project has a client, but it also has stakeholders. These are the people who have a vested interest in the project’s success. Stakeholders can include project team members, managers, project sponsors, and even end-users. It’s critical to keep all stakeholders informed throughout the project life cycle.
This begins by communicating the project’s goals and objectives to everyone involved as soon as possible. You can schedule meetings with stakeholders ahead of time to demonstrate your enthusiasm for the project and set clear expectations for all parties. Providing consistent updates with real numbers and results will keep stakeholders engaged and informed.
2. Clarify the Project Purpose
Purpose is everything. It drives organizational strategy and is the roadmap to maintaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Research by PWC confirms that 79% of corporate leaders consider purpose critical for business success.
Articulating the project purpose to your team members and stakeholders keeps it authentic. It clearly defines the project’s existence, the problem to be solved, and the reason for helping every end-user. Purpose-driven companies grow more than three times faster than others, carve a bigger market share, and forge deeper customer relationships.
3. Create a Risk Response Team
Projects and tasks are all subject to different levels of risk. That’s why you should always have a risk response team. They can help a project stay within the preferred green zone and avoid entering the yellow or the dreaded red zone. Think of a risk response team as the first line of defense when problems occur.
4. Formalize Project Roles
A project is not only the PM’s responsibility. There are team members performing project management functions, even if they don’t have formal roles. Simplify the project by identifying, defining, and formalizing these roles.
For example, a software engineer assists the project manager in documenting technical information and gathering requirements from different business units. However, they may not have the formal knowledge to perform the business analyst role. Consider conducting specialized training and formalizing their role to help them contribute more effectively to the project.
5. Hold Project Kickoff Meetings
Your project kickoff meeting sets the tone for your entire project. When you do this right, the team can hit the ground running motivated, energized, and focused. Use the kickoff meeting time to:
- Establish a common goal
- Clarify roles and responsibilities
- Define the parameters and criteria to measure success
- Forecast potential risks and ways to manage them
- Decide the mode of communication for the project
- Choose your project management methodology and tools
You should include everyone with a stake in the project so that expectations are managed upfront. The earlier you get on their radar, the better.
6. Start with a Detailed Work Definition Document
A common issue in project management is clarifying who is responsible for what. A detailed work document addresses uncertainty and confusion. It documents the work to be done by specific team members, ensuring everyone is clear on the effort, time, and resources required. To foster accountability within your project, create a detailed work definition document and have all your stakeholders sign it.
7. Create a Detailed Work Plan
Formalizing your project’s work plan is key to meeting deadlines and hitting milestones. Without a detailed work plan, it can be challenging to document the various stages of the project. What gets measured gets done. A detailed work plan is a straightforward way to track the progress of all the project’s multiple components.
Write your project plan in terms of the goals and problems being addressed (and what isn’t) instead of just listing the tasks to be completed. Doing this will keep the focus on your work and protect against scope creep. Prioritize project goals, identify deliverables, and estimate task duration to define your schedule and dependencies.
8. Outline Quality Standards Across the Project Life Cycle
Delivering successful projects is hard if the quality is overlooked. Project quality is the:
- Performance
- Functionality
- Reliability
- Consistency of project deliverables
Before starting project execution, it is essential to establish quality benchmarks for the entire project life cycle. Remember to communicate these benchmarks to the relevant stakeholders to maintain transparency and increase the chances of success.
To establish project quality, teams must identify standards and success criteria for every phase in the life cycle. The definition of quality can vary from one project stakeholder to another, which is why it is essential to establish a clear understanding of it.
Use these tips to get started:
- Break down the project into various stages with deliverables
- Set up quality standards by evaluating past projects and reviewing those of competitors
- Validate the quality benchmarks and processes by putting them in writing
- Communicate the quality standards with all project stakeholders to keep them clear and transparent
- Complete the project quality documentation with associated data and supporting information.
9. Document Everything
As a project manager, have you ever seen an assignment delayed by a few days or maybe even a few weeks? Why did this happen, and how do we prevent it from happening again? To answer these questions, you need to draw on evidence.
Documenting everything in your project is a practical step to gathering all the data you need to make better decisions and learn from previous challenges. So write everything down! Project steps, bottlenecks, scope changes, and task dependencies. Even having stakeholder-paid time off (PTO) accounted for is helpful.
10. Engage Project Sponsors
Good project sponsors are the number one predictor of project success, yet fewer than two out of three projects have actively engaged sponsors. A project sponsor’s job is to monitor progress, help resolve issues, champion the project to other executives, and understand how it fits into larger business goals. Project sponsors are the key link between the project manager and higher-ups. Hold regular check-ins with your sponsor to discuss project goals and required resources.
11. Ask for Feedback
Good leaders understand that nobody’s perfect and that we all have areas where we can improve. As a project manager, your job is to ensure the project’s success. Asking for feedback from your team is one of the most powerful ways to grow as a project manager and increase your chances of success.
Awareness of areas for improvement is a highly effective tool. Harnessing team feedback can motivate you to become a better version of yourself. Seeking feedback is a great way to enhance your management skills. Knowing how to teach project management best practices to your team members also helps improve your next project.
12. Sign New Agreement Documents When Necessary
New requests often necessitate changes to the original project scope. When this happens, it’s best practice to have everyone sign the new document. This helps the stakeholders gain a clear understanding of the new scope of work and its impact on the project. Since it creates a documented agreement, there is minimal confusion if deadlines need to be moved.
13. Manage Both Risk and Opportunity
Spend some time imagining worst-case scenarios, their solutions, and how you might prevent them from happening. Discuss this with your team and collate their inputs. A frank team discussion also helps you become aware of any known issues that may be affecting your project.
Not all uncertainties are bad. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for opportunities to deliver value beyond what’s expected. It’s essential to conduct a thorough risk assessment and create a risk management response plan for your project.
14. Schedule Regular Check-Ins With Your Team
Staying in sync with your team is a must when managing a project. Holding a weekly or twice-weekly stand-up with your team is a surefire way to align priorities, get feedback, and clear any roadblocks holding your team back. The key is to keep things short and focused:
- What got done yesterday?
- What’s everyone working on today?
- Who’s stuck, and what can we do about it?
15. Manage Scope Creep
When new requests start coming in, communicate the impact of those requests on the project’s schedule and budget and calculate earned value. Although you may wish to accept a new project or task, this can quickly lead to project overload.
When you have a new request within your project, it’s your responsibility to show how this will affect your timeline or budget. If different stakeholders have competing or conflicting requests, bring everyone together to discuss and clarify their goals, and then move forward with everyone on board.
16. Hold Wrap-Up Meetings
Once your project is complete, it’s time to reflect and see how you can optimize your project management processes for success. Holding a wrap-up meeting is an ideal opportunity to bring all project members together for discussion.
Go over lessons learned and ways to improve for next time, as following the same steps over and over won’t help you succeed.
17. Hold a Project Retrospective
The project isn’t complete when the final deliverable is submitted. It’s complete once you’ve held a retrospective and recorded the lessons learned. During the meeting: review what went well, identify best practices for future use, and brainstorm other ideas for getting work done more smoothly.
5 Top Client Project Management Tools
1. Tackle: The Ultimate Tool for Time Tracking in Client Projects
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- An innovative tagging system that works its way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters
- Intelligent time capture right in your browser.
Trusted by teams at Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation.
Smart Calendar-Integrated Time Tracking
Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain
valuable insights into how your team spends their time. Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time monitoring from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool.
Start using our automatic time tracking software for free with one click today!
2. ProProfs Project: A Simple Tool for Tracking Client Projects
ProProfs Project is a power-packed software that helps you track real-time progress and deliver projects as expected. Its easy-to-use interface makes client onboarding seamless and quick. You can add clients to your project by inviting them as guests.
This allows the client to access project information in real-time and steer the project execution in the right direction in case it starts deviating from the set path. Involving clients in the project management process this way helps enhance overall transparency and run projects efficiently from start to finish.
3. Accelo: Client Portal for Project Transparency
Accelo enables clients to access their projects, contracts, and services in one convenient location. Clients can log in securely and track ongoing issues and projects.
They can even raise their own problems or service requests via the 24/7 self-serve access portal. You can collaborate with clients by allowing them to track selected file notes, emails, and documents, and provide instant feedback.
4. Monday.com: A Highly Customisable Tool for Client Projects
Monday.com offers a fully customizable platform that enables clients to participate in the project execution phase. Using this tool, clients can view progress and step in to tailor any workflow for better results. Its multiple project views make it easy to visualize where the project is headed using:
- Gantt chart
- Timeline
- Chart
- Map views
5. Wrike: Advanced Features for Client-Specific Project Management
Wrike offers powerful Calendar and Gantt charts to help clients access real-time project status without needing to approach the project manager for task updates frequently. Besides, its customizable statuses and workflows allow your clients to stay in the know of which task is at which stage of execution at a glance.
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Start Using Our Automatic Time Tracking Software for Free with One Click Today
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- An innovative tagging system that works its way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters, and intelligent time capture right in your browser.
Trusted by teams at:
- Roblox
- Deel
- Lightspeed Ventures
Tackle: Time Optimization for Professionals
Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time monitoring from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool.
Start using our automatic time tracking software for free with one click today!
