When reporting a project problem, don't stop at what's happening now. An upset customer leads to bad reviews and lost word-of-mouth. A system outage creates backlogs and penalties that linger. Name the immediate damage, then the ripple effects, then what it takes to fix them.
Chapters
How to talk about project issues, tip number 6, talk about the long-term impacts. If you've got an issue such as a system has gone down or there's a problem with a customer at the customer service desk right now, that seems like a one-off incident that you'll be able to address, and then when it's over, you think that it's done. However, almost all issues have some kind of long-term impact. If there's an upset customer, The issue doesn't end when that customer goes away. They may leave bad reviews, tell their friends. There may be some other long-term impact or consequence. If a system goes down, software application goes down, fixing the software application helps people start using again, but there may be an impact of a backlog of work that couldn't be done while the system was down, or maybe there are penalties or issues caused by the service outage. Whenever you have an issue and when you're talking about an issue, make sure you include the long-term impacts of that issue. How do you do it? Well, when you're talking about the issue, talk about the impact right now, and then add a sentence that says, even when we finished this, there will be some other issues and impacts that occur afterwards. Here's what they are. And then you can list them and talk about the effort that they may involve or the outcome or the situation. And that leads the conversation into what you might be able to do about those follow-on impacts. So when you are talking about project issues, make sure you also include the long-term impact.
