Who’ve heard of this position before! I bet that no one has, or if they do, then they don’t know what exactly this role carry.
Working as Technical Project Coordinator for the past 4 years now, has opened my eyes to a whole new world, not in management as this role is classified under, but on most important skill that any business need and can’t continue without, it is “Customer relationship”; a relationship is defined to be a bind between two things, and in our case, a customer relationship is the bind between a business and its customers; Not all business owners realize the important of having a healthy relationship with their customers, they often do the otherwise and instead of gaining their trust, they just loose it by simply laying on them; You may ask how this can be? Simply laying to a customer is by not sticking to a deadline, hidden prices, support or even sticking with the meeting agenda.
Now, in a company that has its customers in the same place as their business, project managers usually maintain the relationship between a client and the company that he works for; however, project managers in IT field sometime do not know how to furnish or even maintain the trust, as they do not have a business business-oriented mind, since all what they’ve did before upgrading to a project managers was purely technical with almost no interaction with clients; technical project managers tends to be very strict with clients, and this might cost the business to lose potential future leads.
In a multiregional IT business, technical project coordination is solution for the above scenario, project managers can relief themselves and focus on their ultimate goal which is “deliver the project within the its budget and meet the client requirements”
Now, here comes the role of project coordination; unlike IT project manager, a coordinator goal is to maintain the client relationship beside other important roles which is to communicate “everything within reason” between the client and Project manager and vies versa; gaining trust is simple; however maintaining the trust is the difficult part; sometimes the business itself tries to destroy the trust that has been built in months by a simple irresponsible 1 minute phone call between technical developer or even a project manager and the client; a project coordinator relationship with the client is built on trust, no lies of any kind, no hard talk, the customer is always right; having person to fight with the customer when he is right is something crucial to maintain the trust, project managers however, sometime do not accept this and they believe that they are always right; form a project coordinator point of view, the customer is always right when he has the right money; despite the fact that the client always come up with new requirements and amendments after signing off the requirement gathering phase or even before delivering the project before a week, then if the client is willing to pay, then we should obey without any delay. Convincing the project manager to obey is not an easy task to do, however it’s doable and it’s the right thing to do.
Maintaining trust means that the client can talk to the coordinator freely, which might lead sometimes to new opportunities as clients start seeking advises from the coordinator; I’ve personally brought around 10 projects to my company by doing so. Clients trust can even reach to the point where they can ask the coordinator on a new feature costing and whether he should take it or not; using the trust, a coordinator can propose new business ideas to the client, which he might give to the company that the coordinator works for or not, but its another way to maintain the trust
Technical project coordination in middle east, is almost the same as human resource role their; the company expects you to lie on your clients, in the human resource case employees are their clients; I personally refuse to do that, as I believe that trust is the key to keep a client
A thought to think of now, imagine a technical project coordinator as a project manager!!!
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