How to Juggle Multiple Clients and Make them all Feel Special

We have all been there and if you are not there now, you will be at some point – juggling multiple clients (or maybe one client but multiple groups within the same client). How do you juggle all the work, keeping all the tasks on schedule and make each and every one of your clients believing that they are your primary client?


Organization is the real key. We all know techniques for keeping organized, so I won’t really discuss that. But once you are organized, here are a few things that may help you provide that white glove treatment all people really crave.

• Constantly prioritize your projects and their tasks. This may mean handling the highest profile project first, not necessarily the most urgent task.
• Ensure that you have committed enough time to complete your tasks.
• Learn to delegate and work as a team
• Don’t sit in your cube and wait for results to come to you. Be proactive and touch base with your projects every day or two. Don’t let them run on cruise control.
• Document important information about the client and make it readily available in a summary form - information such as names, roles, important dates and events (both project dates as well as important client dates such as vacations, graduations, weddings etc).
• Before your next scheduled meeting, quickly review the information – if an important date is near (either past or future) try to ask about that event

The hardest clients to juggle are those that you do not hear from on a regular basis – maybe weeks or months pass between communications. When they do contact you, they desperately need your help on a task that could consume all your time. Do you push your other client to the side and make room and hope to make up for it later? Or do you tell the client you are unavailable and you can either help them at a later date?

The first thing to do is to take a moment and assess the situation. How much of your valuable time would you really be able to provide without compromising your current clients. If the answer is none (or close to none) you should really tell them you are not available. If the client indicates that they really, really need you – do not cave in. Explain to them that you have other commitments – even as they complain, they will recognize your loyalty to your other clients and that you would be loyal to them and not bail on them either. It is all about setting the appropriate expectations.

Transitioning Yourself out of an Ongoing Project

We have all been on projects where team members have transitioned in and out during the life of the project, ramping up for a critical development cycle and then subsequently trimming down once that is complete. We all know the basics about what needs to be done when one of the developers or testers are rolling off the project. But what do you do when it is the Project Manager or Project Lead that is to roll off?

During the life of my current (soon to be former) project, I have had the role of Architect and Project Manager for a large application modernization effort - the client has a very large, home-grown application that is the core of their business. Unfortunately, it is hosted on a platform and technology that has been deemed no longer a viable solution due to upgrade paths and licensing fees. For the first two years my team has implemented the core architecture and development pattern for the client to move the entire application into a true N-Tiered, Microsoft .NET, SQL Server environment.

In addition to developing the architecture and teaching the client the correct way to do software, I was also involved in helping the client find talented developers and architects to be our corporate counterparts. These counterparts have now demonstrated to their management they have enough prowess and business knowledge that my role is now deemed obsolute as an architect - one of the downsides of doing our jobs too well, training our replacements so well that they actually do replace us.

So what are you supposed to do when you, the Lead or Manager is the one being rolled off? In this case, the project team is becoming even more of a staff augmentation delivery arm of the client - with the client performing all the architectural decisions and management. You, as project manager, have different responsibilities to the client as well as your team - which sometimes conflict.

For your client

• Determine the rigor that the ongoing project reporting and tracking should take on now that the management control is transitioned. Do we do status reports the same way? Who is on the distribution list?


• Determine the client personnel who will be taking on your tasks? Do they know what all the tasks are that you perform on a day to day or week to week basis?


• Determine how the client should communicate to your team and resolve issues.

For your team

• Determine the chain of command. Who does your team report to? Who assigns tasks and resolves issues?


• Determine how issues get raised back to your management team when necessary.


• Should your team still supply some sort of project reporting back to managemet? If so, what is the rigor and method?

There are a lot of other house keeping tasks that should be taken care of - almost as if the project is just getting kicked off - determining all the logistics of the project administration and day to day dealings now that the point of contact is no longer involved.