The Secret to On-Time, On-Budget Projects: Tips for Clear Internal Team Communications

1. Determine and document who makes final decisions

When we kick off a project with a new client, one of the key questions we ask up front is: Who makes final decisions? Sometimes it’s our primary contact. Most times, it’s a combination of stakeholders in an organization.

A lot of it depends on the size of your team. Smaller nonprofits might have a small team with only a few decision-makers. Large universities or associations might have multiple stakeholders who need to weigh in. Big decisions often require big approvals. Sometimes that means—whisper it quietly now—The Board.

Managing the likes, dislikes, and expectations of multiple stakeholders is challenging. It can often derail the best of projects. So, decide internally who has the final say on project elements. It doesn’t have to be one person. One person might have final say on creative decisions. Another person might have final say over digital strategy. And, of course, someone must have final say over your budget.

If you establish and assign final decision-making power early, you can bounce through approvals more quickly as the project moves forward. It probably doesn’t have to be said, but we’ll say it anyway—the fewer final decision makers a project has, the smoother it will go.

2. Pick your internal project team with intention and onboard them right away

The beginning of the project is your best opportunity to set the tone and expectations.

Be honest and upfront with everyone—early and often. Think about who needs to be included and who does not. You need to find the right mix of personnel for your organization who can offer valuable strategic insights.

Consider whether an executive should be involved. If they get involved too late in the project, their feedback might force a redo of completed work. You’ll also want to get the right number of stakeholders involved. Too few, and the project direction won’t adequately represent your organization. Too many, and you risk analysis paralysis.

To keep your project moving and hit your deadlines:

1. Get on their calendars far in advance.

2. Include a clear description in the meeting invitation that outlines exactly what you’ll need from them—review, feedback, final approval, etc.

3. Add any supporting documents they may need to reorient themselves.

3. Keep stakeholders informed along the way

Here at Mighty Citizen, weekly status updates are the bread and butter of our client communications. It’s how we keep everyone informed about a project’s progress. In those updates, we include everything we worked on for the week, any pending items or feedback we need, how many hours we’ve used, and what’s next.

This transparency fosters trust. Periodic level-setting also helps identify potential project delays early. But the kinds of updates you give your internal team might look a little different.

For example, an executive or board member will rarely want to read a weekly status report (see time commitment above). In the case of most large projects that we work on, our primary contact needs to update their boss or even their boss’s boss at longer intervals, such as monthly or quarterly. Below, we get into some best practices for updating different leadership teams.

Pro Tip: AI tools can generate summaries from meeting transcripts. Just be sure to review the summary before sharing with leadership. We’re a Google Workspace agency and use Gemini for this task. But it’s a simple process with Zoom, Teams, and just about any AI chatbot your organization has approved.

C-Suite

The C-Suite typically appreciates information that’s high-level, brief, and concise. Give ‘em the highlights! One format we’ve found to be useful is a (very) brief slide deck. Make it 3-4 slides at most.

A slide deck is easy to digest and share. You can cover the highlights with brief bullet points. You can include images demonstrating the work. The person you give the deck to can easily incorporate all or some of it into their monthly or quarterly presentation.

Board presentations

If you have to present an update to the board, you’ll likely have a very short window of time during the meeting. Use it strategically. Use it as an opportunity to educate and engage them.

A great tactic is to bring in the people doing the work—your writers, designers, web admins, marketing strategists, etc. Let your experts share.

A brief, well-organized presentation from the people producing the work can go a long way towards project understanding and support. It builds trust that the project is in capable hands.

4. Conduct a post-project review for future improvements

Whatever project you’re working on won’t be your last. The work of marketing is a river. It ebbs and flows. It goes through moments of rapid movement, then quiet lulls. A post-project review helps you fine-tune your process so you’re ready for those big efforts like website redesigns, comprehensive rebrands, or complex omnichannel campaigns.

So what, exactly, are you reviewing? And how do you structure the review?

Here at Mighty Citizen, we typically conduct a review with a group meeting. Here’s how they usually go:

• What went well? This can be anything, big or small. Maybe you’re happy with the way your team collaborated. Maybe there’s an individual performance that deserves some praise. It could even be the way you overcame challenges like budget constraints. This is a time for high-fives and kudos.

• What went not-so-well? Be honest and constructive. We start a lot of sentences in our reviews with, “I/we could’ve done a better job of …” That’s part of our in-house culture of continuous improvement—no judgment, no admonishment. We might talk about the quality of the final product. We’ll grapple with whether we fell short of expectations (or aspirations). We ask if we made the right decisions about how the project was managed. Your review might touch on different topics.

• What new things were tried that should stay (or be cut)? Every project scope is different. Every project team is different. That usually means we’re tweaking our process to accommodate budgets, expectations, and skill levels. In almost every project, we try a little something new to improve efficiency, quality, or both. Think about anything new for your team. Maybe it was your first time going through a website redesign or full rebrand. Maybe it was your first time collaborating at scale across your organization. What new things did you try? What new competencies did you have to learn? Is it something you’ll carry over into new projects?

Our favorite project management tools

GANTT Chart

A GANTT chart is a visual diagram that displays tasks as horizontal bars. The X axis is the timeline. The task bars also typically include milestones and dependencies. It’s a staple here at Mighty Citizen, and a staple of project managers in every industry.

RACI Charts

A RACI chart is a matrix that documents roles within a project. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. Each row is a task. Each column is a project team member. The grid in the middle is where you place an R, A, C, or I for a team member’s role on each task. Download our template!

Generative AI

We’re using the blanket term here because most AI tools are capable of performing a few useful project management tasks. If you can get an audio transcription of every meeting, you can run it through an AI chatbot to surface takeaways and summarize the meeting. With some creative prompt engineering, you can even get a chatbot to create a list of next steps for a project. As with any AI tool, make sure everything is checked by a human.

Let’s work on a project together

Some projects are too big, too important, or require too much discipline-specific expertise for your team to execute on your own. If that’s the case, reach out to us. We can tackle everything from huge, enterprise-level projects—like a full digital transformation for a research university—or smaller, campaign-level projects like an association retention campaign.