When facing a problem that impacts your project, it is essential to keep your stakeholders in the loop. This means updating them on the issue, the potential solutions, and the estimated timeline for a resolution. However, many professionals struggle with giving clear and effective updates. In this blog post, we will discuss how to update your stakeholders to minimize confusion and keep them informed.
When receiving updates, stakeholders are looking for: Problem, Assessment, Impact and Timeline (PAIT). Stakeholders generally want to know the problem, your assessment of the situation and recommendations if you have formulated any. Determine the impact of the problem and when it will be fixed.
Problem
The first thing stakeholder wants to know is what the problem is. For example, if you are experiencing performance issues, the problem might be that your website is loading slowly.
Impact
The next step is to explain the impact of the problem. This is where you discuss how the problem is affecting your business. For our performance issue example, the effect might be that customers are getting frustrated and leaving the site before purchasing. You also have to delve deeper look at the downstream and upstream impacts. Will the database query slowness impact other end users that use the database. Do other systems run daily jobs for data transfers?
Assessment
After explaining the problem, it is time to assess what is causing the pain. For the performance issue example, you might assess that a slow database query is the cause of the problem. I would suggest you dig deeper into the issue to discover the underlying reasons. Is the database query running slow because not enough server capacity has not been allocated, or are internal users running a memory-intensive query that is contributing to slowdown? Although you could carry out a quick fix to alleviate the immediate bottleneck. You will need to address the chain of causation that led to the downturn in the first place—for example, instituting internal user certification to ensure people know how to write efficient queries or policy guidelines to ensure when future server capacity is added.
Timeline
Finally, you will want to provide a timeline for solving the problem. This should include an estimated time for resolving the problem and any milestones that you expect to hit. For our performance issue example, you might say that you hope the problem to be fixed within the next week and that you will provide an update at the end of each day if you are not able to give an estimate. You can give a time when you will be able to provide an estimate. And be sure you honour that promise.
By following these steps, you can ensure that your stakeholders are updated on the problem and its resolution.
