Been with my current employer 9 months - we're a charity. I have finally been given the responsibility to manage a project which my organisation were the successful bidders for. I don't have a lot of project management experience to be honest, so its still new to me. The organisation we tendered to are being royal PITAs. After accepting our bid they now want us to do things differently.
Basically they want us to create something from scratch without having any meetings with them about how they want us to do it.
We had said in our bid how many planning and progress meetings we proposed having but now the key people "don't have time" due to holidays or they are 'too busy to meet' and want us to either proceed without the meetings (basically guessing what they want) or do the work over 6 months instead of the agreed 3 months.
We have other projects to deliver in the autumn and we are a small team. we had planned our diaries around doing this work over the summer. Our bid gave dates for undertaking the work and as I said this was accepted.
Email exchanges are becoming quite terse. I am finding myself saying things like "as outlined in the proposal", "per my last email" and "please see attached" but I'm worried I'm appearing unprofessional!
They keep asking me questions I cannot answer because they keep putting off meetings where I would have been able to get this information or agree key elements.
I did speak to my manager and he agrees that I need to keep referring back to the proposal and highlighting to them that we may not be able to deliver if they want things changed. My manager won't respond to any emails though or even call them - he's leaving it to me to deal with. I have invisible disabilities (we are a disability charity) and I can get anxious with conflict.
Does anyone have any tips on how to manage a difficult client? They have finally agreed to call on Monday and I can see it being quite a difficult one.