Articles - my other blogs

few my articles on the following blogs:

http://yamininafde.blogspot.com/ - list of all articles (a few linked)

http://ynafde-article1.blogspot.com - A Tryst with MBAs or MCAs

http://ynafde-article2.blogspot.com/ - Microsoft Word 2000 and Readability

http://ynafde-article3.blogspot.com/ - Client-Friendly Atmosphere: The Polish and The Lub

Client-Friendly Atmosphere: The Polish and The Lubricants

For the past few years in most projects, I interacted with a lot of clients. All these projects were based offshore, where client interaction was mainly through emails or teleconferences. When you do not work face-to-face with clients (onsite), communication plays a crucial role in winning your clients’ confidence and making them feel good or comfortable with you and your team.

I took the opportunity to speak with most clients when they visited the offshore premises to understand what makes them feel at ease when working with offshore teams. Some of these simple but critical points are discussed in this article.

The key success factors to keep clients at ease are:
Communication: develop an excellent communication with the client.
- Video/Audio conference: Be guarded especially till you gain the confidence of your client, as to what you say in these conferences. The advantage with video conferences is being face-to-face with client where your body language supplements your words, where as with teleconferences you have to be very conscious of what is being said.
- Keep clients in the loop (emails): All clients love to know as much as possible about offshore happenings.
- Documentation: Any dialogues on technical issues, documentation issues and agreements must be documented in an email communication to avoid future disagreement or misunderstanding.

Gain expertise with used in the project. Do not ask clients too many questions about the tool.
Be committed to a super quick response. Clients hate waiting for days for an email response.
Make all decisions based on facts, not on opinion, not our or the client’s organization, or geographical difference.
Keep an open mind. Always be fair and objective.
Demonstrate extra effort, extra commitment and responsibility to the clients in executing the project.

Some specific tips for managers to gain client’s confidence are:

• Interact with the client teams to gather and finalize requirements.
• Assimilate and train your team on client processes, templates, and tools, to maintain client-specified quality and consistency across deliverables.
• Engage in project planning with the client managers for the product/s onsite.
• Draw up internal timelines for review and delivery schedules.
• Track project execution. Provide regular, periodic status reports as required by the client product teams.
• Coordinate reviews with the client.
  

The key areas that one needs to concentrate upon are:
Project management: It is good practice to gain advanced knowledge of documentation/training tools, knowledge of design and information architecture principles and to optimise one’s analytical ability to analyze technical documents.
Execution effectiveness: Excellent customer interfacing skills, analytical approach, technical team leadership, clarity of articulation, business communication, customer orientation and building consensus and confidence with clients, and industry peers.
Organizational abilities.
Team members should be capable of performing the following responsibilities with ease:

° learn and adopt client standards, tools, templates, and style sheets to deliver consistent, high-quality documentation
° adopt client’s quality processes to ensure quality effectiveness, if required, interact with client’s customers to work with customer-specified requirements
° design documentation deliverables guided by client’s standards and guidelines when required

Email:

Email communication is entirely different from face-to-face meetings, where others see your facial expression and body language. Choose your words carefully. Meanings of words can easily be misconstrued. Some basic precautions that can be taken are:
- Be professional in your approach unless you are writing a purely personal mail. (Being formal does not mean using long-winding sentences and big words. Be simple and direct).
- Be formal: Never write one-liners without the correct form of address in the beginning of the e-mail like Dear X, etc.
- Avoid one-liners in the subject line of the e-mail and mails with only subject and no body.
- Make sure you format your e-mail text so that different types of content, like ideas, points, etc. is clearly demarcated.
- If you are responding to a sensitive issue, read out the mail loudly. If you can’t get the meaning, re-write it.
- Always ask yourself: if you receive such e-mails from others, how would you feel?
- If you don’t get the response from the client teams wait for a day and give them a chance to respond. Send another email or try another means of communication, like making a phone call. If you still don’t get a response, send another mail copying your manager.
- If there are critical release dates and you cannot wait for a day, get back to them with follow up email or a phone call, but ALWAYS be patient.


Always own the documentation deliverable. Sometimes even if the problems are legacy and you have not caused them, it helps to owning problems in these deliverables. Most often than not the client comes back saying, ‘we are sorry, it was a mistake on our part.’

The tips that I have discussed in this article always stood me in good stead.

Hope this article benefits all of you in one way or the other, and here’s wishing a everyone a client-friendly atmosphere.