Getting sign off from a customer during a project can be a frustrating experience. It can hold up the work on the project, pushing out your timeline and impede your project cashflow where payments are dependent on getting acceptance. All of this is not good for project management success!
The issues that you may come across in getting a document or a deliverable signed off include:
- Insufficient time allowed in the plan for review of the deliverable item
- Insufficient support given to customers in the handover of a deliverable
- Insufficient project management around this crucial period
I’ll talk about each of these briefly in this post.
Insufficient time allowed
It’s hard to stay in front when you didn’t have enough time allowed in the first place. So consider the review periods that will be required, both internal to your organisation and at the customer end. The more reviews and the more people involved in getting sign off, the greater the time period that needs to be allowed for. It can be really tempting when planning a project to reduce these periods so try as hard as you can to resist calls from above to cut down the review times.
Insufficient support given to customer at the time of handover of the deliverable
Think about what you are handing over to the customer and ensure that you give clear instructions on what you need from them. Be clear about what it is you expect them to do with the deliverable, be clear that you are expecting approval or proposed amendments (or whatever is relevant), be clear about the format you wish to receive feedback in and be clear about the timeframe you expect to have a response by. Consider also that your customers may need help with their review of the deliverable and provide the necessary assistance. For example at the handover of a piece of software for User Acceptance Testing you may need to provide a training session or demonstration, along with necessary testing plan and/or scripts and instructions on how and where to log issues with the software.
Insufficient project management
This is not the time to leave people to their own devices. You should keep in regular contact with your customer and facilitate the approval of the deliverable by pushing them along in performing their actions as well as solving any issues that may impede them from undertaking their review or providing their approval.
Projects can really blow out around approval times, so to maximise your chances of project management success make sure you allow enough review and signoff time, provide support and manage the process.
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