Project issues are inevitable in any project that is undertaken by you or your business. You will have done your best during the project planning phase to mitigate against the risk of project issues, but they will happen.
When they do, you have to decide when to communicate the project issues out to the rest of the project team and/or the customer depending on whether this is something that will affect their view of the delivery.
If you communicate to early i.e. “cry wolf” and the project issue never occurs, then the team may not be as believing the next time an issue happens and you flag it. They certainly won’t be if this happens a number of times.
If you communicate to late then the team and most certainly the customer will ask you why you didn’t let them know if good time to see if the situation could be addressed. The customer is far more likely at this stage to push back very hard if the issue is going to cause a project change that is going to incur cost to them or a delay to the deliverable date.
So when is the right time to raise the project issue?
For me, it’s when the facts present themselves i.e. you can back up the suspicion of the project issue with hard, cold data that tells you there is a problem. If the data is not their to substantiate the claim or is insufficient then it is to early to communicate the issue to the greater project team.
This is why it is key to track your project in an accurate manner so that you do have the data when you need it!
Have you ever “cried wolf” on a project issue only for it never to happen?
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Eoin Redmond, MyProjectTracker. MyProjectTracker said: Crying wolf – when is the right time to let people know when you have a problem in your project? #pmot http://cot.ag/djcSZ8 [...]
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