During the execution of an international project, meeting customer s milestones and getting milestone payments for your company should be top priority. However, customer requests, demands, interferences, scope changes, and personnel changes have to be managed carefully so as to be able to meet deliverable and payment milestones.

Customers main technical and nontechnical contacts and their backups should be fixed from the start of the project. No one in your company should respond to the customer except you or your backup person. Again, response time is very crucial for good customer management. Even if you do not have an answer to a request from your customer, respond immediately by acknowledging the issue on hand listing the actions you are taking to find a solution, and by providing a definite response date. All communication with the customer should be electronically filed in chronological order.

Customer s response to your requests can be more challenging. After all, they are the customers. Sometimes you might get the cold shoulder. As the international project manager, you cannot pester your customer constantly, but a right amount of persistency pays off. Sometimes you might have to help them get an answer. For example, a British customer could not provide the project manager with the interface structure tolerances in a timely fashion for the subsystem design. The customer s designer was on a month s medical leave, and did not have anyone else to help him. The project manager offered the customer that he himself would do...