With Project Status, Silence isn’t Golden
Handing over a project to an outsourced business valuation firm and hoping for an on-time, accurate report shouldn’t be a leap of faith. These are your clients, and you can’t just sit back and hope everything will turn out right in the end. If there are problems, you need to know about them well before your deadline. And if there aren’t? That’s good to know too!
In other words, silence is not golden. Updates are golden. Status reports. Questions. A more or less continuous bird’s eye view. All 24-karat goodness.
Faith has its place, but that place is not in the world of working with an outsourced firm. For that, you want information and clarity.
Start with your initial contract with the firm. Is there a schedule for communication? Will the analyst team or a manager be sending you regular updates? How often, and in what form? Is the firm set up to accommodate your preferred communication medium—email, Slack, your in-house workflow management software, Morse code, semaphore?
What kind of information will those messages contain? Will updates be granular, or are you more of a big-picture person? Will you be cc’d on team emails if they’re wrestling with a question or an obstacle? Do you want to be?
Really, the long and short of it is this: Make sure you’re partnering with an outsourced firm that’ll keep you informed about your project’s progress every step of the way—or every other step, if that works better for you. Or every third. Name your communication preferences up front: frequency, content, and medium. If a firm can’t meet you where you are on this front, keep looking for one that can.
Outsourcing some of your workload is supposed to make life easier. It’s not supposed to test your faith, your patience, or the limits of your bandwidth.