I recently spoke to a group of college students embarking on their first consulting projects. We discussed the email updating portion of the projects and there were tips that I hadn’t really put into words before but have always practiced. So I thought it would be fun to share them here! Subjects on these emails should be “Update on (project) – First Update” or “Update on (project) – Midpoint” or something like that. Consider these will get filed and if they need to be accessed later, it is helpful to have subjects that make that easy. If you are doing an update email for a client, start with a thank you for the project or their time or something. If you are struggling with a project, you are nervous or concerned or generally freaked out. Typically because that is your focus, it is more difficult […] Continue reading
Defining Both Success and Failure
When I start a project, I always define what success looks like. Often I do what success looks like and what the ultimate, totally amazing success would look like (just for fun). Knowing this in advance means you know how to evaluate the project or program and if you keeping within your plan. But the other thing I do is define failure. For some projects this really is anything other than success, but for others, failure is different and there’s a gap between the two. Why would I care? Here’s an example. Recently with a customer we tried a new publication for advertising. It was a good risk – the money wasn’t huge, the audience was right, etc. Success was defined as 25 people saying the came in from the ad. But since we only committed to once, we recognized we had no repetitive benefits. […] Continue reading