How to Involve Clients in Your Projects

Moving a project forward is easy, but moving it in the right direction requires a different approach. That’s what we are going to explore today! Steering a project forward and in the right direction requires involving the client.

When managing or creating a project, clients must be involved so that risks can be eliminated. Projects managers that don’t involve clients often experience mismatched expectations, wastage of resources, and lost time. However, those who involve clients in their projects go home with results.

Our today’s piece will showcase five ways to involve clients in your projects, followed by how Breeze can help you to get there.

5 Ways to Involve Clients in Your Projects

As the saying goes, “it’s all about putting the clients first.”. But if you don’t involve clients in your projects, how can you put them first or even second, as a matter of fact? Here are five ways you can involve clients in your projects and break the stereotypes.

1. Gather Project Details with Clients

A project for the sake of the project is not a good use of time. No company will pay you to create projects or solutions that aren’t worth it. To make your projects worthwhile, the first step is to gather project details with clients.

Call a meeting with your client who’s assigning you a respective project. From the execution plan to real-world examples and ideas, discuss everything from scratch and build out the big-picture ideas from there. That’s how you are involving your client and making sure that they are the center of attention.

From the start, keep your clients close to your projects. Inquire about every single thing they have listed in the project brief. Explore every single project detail with your clients to make sure you and your clients are on the same page. This is also an excellent opportunity to clarify any concepts and dig deeper into why the customer is pursuing their chosen direction.

Whether it’s about sourcing labor to equipment or other services, gather every bit and piece of project information from your client. Don’t let assumptions get the better of you; carefully curate all the details with the help of your client.

If you’ll involve your client in your project from the start by gathering project details alongside your client, it helps both you and your client in the long run.

2. Share Progress, Projects, and Activities

The next and one of the essential ways to involve clients in your projects is by sharing progress, projects, and activities. Sharing the real-time progress of projects with your client while assisting both you and your client in checking if everything’s going well. When your client will be able to see the real-time progress of projects and activities, they will feel more connected with you.

Sharing insights, and milestones like due dates, the progress of completion, and remaining tasks will come in handy to involve clients in your project. By simply sharing the roadmap of the project or reporting the daily targets to your client, it will make them feel involved and like they are in control.

By sharing progress, projects, and activities, you’ll be keeping the client in the loop. This way, they’ll be able to engage with the project more often and guide its direction. Sharing progress or activities will also open the communication and feedback door for your clients.

If you aren’t sharing the latest progress of your projects, you are missing an opportunity for involving your clients. By simply alerting them with which tasks are completed and what’s left on the deck, it’s a simple and effective way to involve them in your projects and for good.

3. Seek Feedback

Asking for your clients’ feedback is one of the securest and beneficial ways to involve clients in your projects. Seeking feedback from your clients will not just help you to involve them swiftly, but you’ll be able to see what they are expecting from you.

Involving clients in your projects is simple and straightforward by asking for feedback. All you need to do is just share some progress of the project and welcome your client to bash, smash, or appreciate. This way, you or your team will be able to get some real insight from your client, and it will open up the door for more involvement and a better result.

Once your client will start feeling comfortable to provide feedback, then there’s no going back. You’ll be continuously handed out with feedback notes that will increase the client involvement rate in your projects. And side-by-side, help you to figure out the expectations and demands of your client.

Asking for feedback is one of the easiest routes to involve your clients in your projects. And it doesn’t just aid the involvement factor but helps you and your team to fix things, make improvements, and more. Another thing frequent feedback does is that it lays out the path towards clear communication. More on communication below.

4. Communicate More Often

Another simple way to involve clients in your projects is to communicate more often. These days, clients and the project managers don’t communicate often, which leads to problems like mismatched expectations, missed deadlines, and others. By communicating more often, you and your team can involve clients in your projects and eliminate avoidable problems.

Involving your clients via communicating more often is simple; you just need to find ways for communicating. For instance, you can regularly share project details and progress with your clients via weekly meetings, daily video calls, or email rundowns of recent work. Another thing you and your team can do to involve clients via communication is to send daily activities reports related to the projects to clients and ask for feedback or suggestions.

Communication with clients can be increased in various ways. But the key is to communicate if you are looking forward to involving clients in your projects for real. Communicating more often will help both the client and you to steer the project in a forward and positive direction.

Don’t fear communication; start communicating more often with your clients to drastically involve them in your projects in a simple and straightforward manner.

5. Delegate Tasks to Clients or Work on a Project With Them

Lastly, one of the best ways to involve clients in your projects is to delegate tasks to them or work with them on your projects. What we mean is to assign them tasks related to your project like monitoring the activities, checking up on employees, etc. That’s how you can swiftly involve clients in your projects.

If you are unable to involve clients in your projects, and they are unaware of what’s happening, you can invite them to your project pool and allow them to work on the project with you by assigning short and simple tasks. When you assign them tasks, they’ll communicate with you, ask questions, and provide their feedback. This ultimately will lead to their great amount of involvement.

Welcoming your clients to work on projects will help you to involve them easily. From alerting about project status to assigning them tasks, clients will feel more involved by these gestures.

Lastly, the effort of involving clients via delegating them project-related tasks will help both you and the clients to stay updated, on time, and regulated. It’s like two parties creating one thing so that the end result can match up to their expectations.

Now that we’ve explored some communication tips for project management, it’s time to introduce the best tool for the job: Breeze. Next, we’ll show how Breeze can help you involve clients in your projects with its top-notch features. But first, what’s Breeze?

Breeze - An Intuitive Project Management Tool

Breeze is an intuitive, advanced project management tool that helps you and your team organize, plan, and track your projects’ progress. Top companies around the world like Disney, Red Hat, and Travel Audience use Breeze to make the most of their projects.

Breeze gives you and your team members the ability to control projects, collaborate efficiently, create detailed reports, and more! Breeze has found the perfect balance between being too complicated and too simple so that your team can achieve more in less time. Keep your projects aligned and organized with one of the best project management tools, Breeze.

How Breeze Can Help You Involve Clients in Your Projects

Being one of the most advanced project management tools out there, Breeze has features that will help you to involve clients in your projects. They are specially designed for teams who are all about involving clients in their projects. In total, there are three features that deal with involving clients in projects - public projects, tasks, and reports.

The creators of Breeze have specially curated and tailored these features for seamlessly involving clients in projects. And here’s how these features stack up and help you to involve clients in your projects.

Public Projects

The Public Projects feature in Breeze is designed to engage clients with the progress of your project. With the help of this feature, you and your team can make the projects visible to your clients for getting their feedback, ideas, suggestions, opinions, and more.

With this feature, you can easily gather project details with clients and sharing the progress of the projects. From keeping everybody updated related to the issue or new findings and getting feedback, public projects are ideal for involving your client.

With the help of the Public Projects feature in Breeze, your clients can see the ongoing projects in a list or board form. What’s more interesting is that clients can add comments, see time tracking, and estimates. And here’s the catch, anyone can join in on the project discussion or check time tracking without creating an account on Breeze. You just need to enter the email of your client, and a magic link will automatically be sent to them for hopping on the discussion.

With Breeze Public Projects, you don’t need to create separate systems for the public and staff. All you need to do is just update the permission settings of the project to involve everyone!

Public Tasks

The Public Tasks feature available in Breeze allows you to delegate short and mini tasks to clients for the sake of involvement. Without actually adding the client to your project team, you can involve them by assigning short tasks, and goals with the Public Tasks feature available in Breeze.

With the Public Tasks feature in Breeze, clients don’t need to indulge themselves in the hassle of creating an account or learning the tool. With a simple share link, they will be able to see the tasks that have been assigned to them. Moreover, the Public Tasks feature can be used to share presentations, specifications, and more with clients through a simple magic link.

The Public Tasks feature has endless possibilities for involving clients in your projects. From delegating tasks to asking for feedback, Public Tasks can be used in many scenarios without the need to create new accounts for clients to collaborate.

Public Reports

Involving clients in your projects via sharing multiple reports, progress, task completion, activities have been made easy with the Public Reports feature of Breeze. You and your team can easily share your progress, activities, and milestones with multiple filters using a magic link with your client.

What’s great about the Public Reports feature is that you can select preferred time frames and other useful filters. This way, you don’t have to bulk up your client with reports from time frames that don’t matter in the current scenario. The feature of Public Reports lets you make the most of Breeze’s reporting system so you can share different types of reports with your clients without any complications.

Start making the most of the Public Reports feature and involve clients in your projects by sharing progress, activities, and more like never before.

Conclusion

Breeze is a great project management tool that lets you involve clients in your projects with its rich public features. Start involving clients in your projects with Breeze Public Reports, Public Tasks and Public Projects today!