Project Management Blogs

A recent failure of a 60$M telecom project invites the question of why?  The answer:  poor leadership.

But this answer is too general.  It doesn't really help us understand what we can do as project leaders to increase the likelihood our projects are successful.

1. It is best not to share the project plan with the project team as it leads to unnecessary and usually incredibly stupid questions.

As important as project teams, project tasks, and critical milestones are to project success, they do not compare to the importance of marketing.  To succeed in today’s new normal business environment where sales are lackluster, cash is tight, resources are scarce and customer service expectations are high, project execution is no longer enough; instead, you must also be an expert at marketing your project to ensure it gains the right amount of attention and traction to accelerate project results!

The challenge is that project managers aren’t typically skilled marketers.  We can block and tackle with the best of project leaders; however, when it comes to marketing and promotion, we pale in comparison.  In my 20+ years of experience in working with project teams across a multitude of industries, geographies and project scopes, I’ve found a few simple marketing tactics to make a significant difference:  1) Communicate the value.  2) Use multi-media.  3) Word of mouth.

1.   Communicate the value:  Undoubtedly, the #1 key to success in marketing your project is to communicate the project’s value.  How does it provide value to the company?  Does it tie in with the company strategy?  Will it free up cash flow?  Improve service levels?  Increase profitability?  Have you updated your project team?  Your boss?  Your mentor?  Any leaders who might be impacted by the project?  I’ve found that there is no quicker way to ensure the speed of progress than to continually communicate the value to each person affected or impacted along the critical path – and preferably each person’s manager as well. 

For example, in an ERP implementation, we had to rally the troops around the implementation of a piece of functionality.  This critical path step would affect the shipping and receiving function in a way that would increase the workload temporarily.  The only way we gained enough commitment to increase workload with an already short-staffed and overworked team was by not only communicating the project’s long term value to the logistics team members (and their contribution to it) but also by communicating the team’s impact to the project success to the manager responsible for the increased workload.  The key was that the critical milestone was no longer a project team success; it was a combined logistics and project team success. 

2.   Use multi-media:  Communicating the value once is not enough.  However, even communicating it 10 times isn’t enough.  In order to break through the barriers so that all related parties and company leaders understand the value of the project (and would be willing to support the project even when it becomes inconvenient), it is vital to communicate via multi-media.  It’s much easier to ignore a simple conversation than it is to ignore multi-media.

There are countless ways to promote your project leveraging multi-media.  First, utilize the company’s newsletter and promote your project – why will it add value, who is on the team, what accomplishments have been achieved, etc.  If you do not have a newsletter, create one.  I’ve yet to see a tasteful newsletter turned down by business leaders as it helps to rally the teams.  And who wouldn’t like to read about their achievements in the news?  Next, leverage the intranet.  Create a section for the project.  Utilize social media.  How about a brown bag lunch session to talk about the project and ask for input? 

3.   Word of mouth:  I’ve found that there is nothing more powerful than the word of mouth.  Simple yet extremely effective.  Create a buzz about your project.  Soon you’ll have folks asking how they can help the team!

How do we create a word of mouth?  Start talking about the project.  Ask the project team to talk about the project.  If each person finds 1 or 2 target people to communicate with about the project and its value, it will spread quickly.  Make sure to include at least a few executives and leaders.  Ask each of these folks if they would share a highlight with their team or someone with a related interest in the project or its results.  Ask them for feedback.  There is nothing more powerful than referrals.  Soon, your project will be in the limelight.  Remember, make it interesting, show enthusiasm and appreciate their ideas and feedback.  The rest will follow.

The power of marketing is immense.  Do you think it will be easier and quicker to ensure project success if just the project team is committed or if you’ve involved and engaged not only the project team but their key influencers and colleagues? 

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Foundations for Effective Communication

Last month's blog highlighted the need to speak up at the right time in project life to avoid problems and minimize the impact of those that are not avoided. In an earlier blog I discussed Improving Communication: Controlling Your Body Language and Tone.

This month we'll explore communication techniques that can be used to make speaking up easier and more effective and enable the control needed to moderate behavior and speech.

Effective communication relies on mindfulness, emotional intelligence, right intention, basic facilitation skills, the right vocabulary and courage. Over the next few months we'll explore these in the context of project work.

Mindfulness

Let's start with mindfulness, the ability to be consciously aware of what is happening in and around you. It implies clear, objective observation. Mindfulness is the foundation for effective communication. It enables emotional intelligence and the ability to facilitate. It enables you to choose the right words and behavior for each situation.  Increased mindfulness has also been shown to promote good health, better memory, concentration and enhanced performance in general.

Mindfulness is cultivated by mindfulness meditation. It is a very simple practice, just comfortably observing things like your own breath, feelings, thoughts and mental constructs (models, beliefs, opinions, etc.). These are objects of mindfulness. Additional objects of mindfulness are the way other people behave, what they say and how they say it. In effect anything that occurs in or around you can be an object of mindfulness.  By observing these phenomena as objects the mind is trained to become more objective.  Objectivity leads to better decision making and that leads to better performance.

For an instruction on how to do mindfulness meditation go to http://www.pitagorskyconsulting.com/articles/article/6339267/106485.htm.

Why Mindfulness is Important

Mindfulness is a key to communication because it makes it possible to be responsive rather that reactive. If when faced with a stressful situation a person can feel his or her feelings before reacting to them, then there is the possibility of choosing what to say and how to say it. 

The ability to see and feel the reactions of others to what one says and does makes it possible to shift behavior, body language, tone and the content of communication to get the kind of response one is looking for. 

When faced with a challenging situation in which the desire to speak up about a sensitive topic is being blocked by fear or lethargy, it is mindfulness that enables clear thinking to arrive at the optimal course of action.  It does so because it enables a "step back" that separates oneself from her feelings and provides the "space" to decide. 

Typically, people are so identified with their feelings and emotions that they do not have, or even think they can have, the ability to decide. Anger results in scowling or yelling; fear in withdrawal and avoidance.  One becomes stuck in his or her conditioning.

Mindfulness meditation gives the practitioner the ability to see experientially that there is choice; the ability to break old habits and respond creatively and appropriately in every situation. Anger is felt as anger, fear as fear, but these emotions are not immediately converted into unskillful behavior.

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. 

                                                                       - George Santayana

In my previous posts in the From the Sponsor’s Desk series, I’ve focused on real projects and the lessons we can learn from those experiences, good and not so much. My reference point in each case has been Project Pre-Check. It provides a framework of best practices, mined from a variety of sources including project management, software development, management of change, strategic planning, quality practices and others, that project stakeholders need to consider at project launch, throughout the course of the change and into the post completion review. But what can an organization or an individual do with those learnings to gain ongoing value? This post suggests an approach.

Project completion reviews or post-mortems are often seen as an essential best practice that enables organizations to learn from their experiences. However, all too frequently, the insights gained from post implementation reviews are lost to posterity.

There are a ton of books, periodicals and articles that address project management, software engineering and management of change disciplines and practices. But the rate of success for major business and technology changes is still well below 50%? Why? The bottom line - we lack a common mechanism where findings can be stored, examples cited and recommendations for future undertakings recorded and accessed. And, we lack the structure and discipline to ensure that our knowledge is managed and referenced consistently and rigorously.

According to Nancy Dixon in her conversation matters blog, “NASA learned its lesson about losing knowledge early in 1990. They experienced “the sad recognition that much of the knowledge about how to build the Saturn V rocket that took the astronauts to the moon, had retired along with the engineers who had been encouraged to take early retirement”. In response, NASA created the NASA Engineering Network, a knowledge network to promote learning and sharing among NASA's engineers. The Network includes the NASA Lessons Learned data base, “the official, reviewed learned lessons from NASA program and projects”.

Most stakeholders involved in a change aren’t aware of all the best practice information out there and aren’t inclined to spend the time and money to find out. They’re business people, financial types, actuaries, engineers, marketing folks, business analysts, IT practitioners. They’re not project management or management of change experts. They don’t really understand the role they need to play and the knowledge they need to have to ensure success! They just want to get the job done.

So, what do you do as a sponsor, stakeholder, PM, BA or other interested party to leave a legacy of lessons learned? There are five critical steps:

1. Identify and confirm accountability for managing lessons learned

Somebody needs to own this practice, to establish the goals and objectives, to measure performance, communicate to stakeholders and establish and drive initiatives to increase organizational value. Even open source software groups, which count on thousands of interested volunteers to deliver and enhance functionality, have managing entities to oversee progress. Find an owner and hold him or her accountable. More on this later.

2. Build or acquire a framework

Even with lots of great experiences, insights and findings, without some kind of organizing structure, a collection of project post-mortems will pose an unwieldy and perhaps insurmountable barrier to leveraging collective lessons learned. Fortunately, PMI, ISO, ISACA, SEI and many other organizations have developed frameworks and a wealth of best practice information. I personally developed the Project Pre-Check Decision Framework to bring together the best of project management, management of change, software development and other practices and provide a Lessons Learned framework in my consulting practice. Select a structure you and your organization are familiar with and build it up with real world experiences and examples to facilitate effective use and enable real performance improvements. Or build your own framework.

3. Enforce usage

Having a comprehensive, easy to access, easy to use facility for mining best practices adds absolutely no value if no one uses it. So part of the Lessons Learned challenge, and a critical responsibility for the owner, is to ensure that everyone uses it, on every assignment, for every project. That use needs to involve a thorough review to identify and leverage applicable best practices and contributed learnings in a form and structure others can use. I can hear the groans already! More bullshit! More red tape! Get over it! If your organization wants to improve its ability to deliver major business and technology change successfully, a certain level of rigor and compliance is essential. What would you rather be, a sponsor, PM, BA or architect with an incredible track record of successful project deliveries, enabled by an organizational ability to leverage lessons learned, or an incredible individual contributor with a mixed record of project successes? Your choice!

4. Manage the transformation of project experiences to organizational Lessons Learned

A key challenge is gathering the experiences and insights of each project participant and the collective wisdom of project teams and abstracting that information into the selected framework. Don’t leave it up to the BA or PM to post the project learnings to the Lessons Learned framework! The owner needs to assume that responsibility and establish the analytical mechanisms and quality and usability standards that will ensure that others, in different circumstances and on other assignments, can quickly and effectively gain value from the information.

5. Manage Lessons Learned value contribution

There is no point in doing anything beyond individual project post-mortems if you’re not willing to manage the organizational value contribution. Getting a return from Lessons Learned means measuring usage, compliance, value derived and contribution frequency and identifying gaps and discrepancies in content and application. The measurement results provide the fodder to develop and implement continuing improvements to the practices, increasing the value delivered to the organization.

Where should Lessons Learned be managed? The PMO is an obvious suspect. The PMO mandate is usually very compatible with a Lessons Learned program. It typically has a broad view, encompassing enterprise or organizational initiatives, programs and projects. It should be tracking and reporting on aggregate project performance and taking steps to improve that performance, actions that are very compatible with a Lessons Learned program.

But, implementing a Lessons Learned practice across an organization is another change that has to be sold, prioritized, funded, initiated, staffed, managed and monitored. It is still very worthwhile but there is another option – the individual Lessons Learned practice. As a professional, you have undoubtedly committed yourself to a program of continuous improvement. An individual Lessons Learned practice starts and ends with you. You need to follow the same five steps reviewed above but you don’t have to sell anybody else on the idea. You are the decision maker. As you gain value, and confidence, you’ll build a track record and reputation others will notice. Also, share your experiences with your peers. Chances are you’ll find an enthusiastic audience and perhaps an attentive sponsor in waiting. Good luck.

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