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Author: Sean Lowe

Avoid Communication Risks by Honing Razor-Sharp Communication Skills

Written by Sean Lowe on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Avoid Communication Risks by Honing Razor-Sharp Communication Skills

Make no mistake about it, projects, like personal relationships succeed and fail according to the degree of effective communication.

The adept Project Manager is able to navigate around communication risks by utilizing communication as a tool to forge long lasting, positive working relationships and leveraging them to execute and deliver successful projects.

So, what are the secret ingredients to these razor-sharp communication skills?

They are …

  1. Knowing your audience and connecting with them.
  2. Remaining politically astute
  3. Establishing your communication vehicle
  4. Timing and Anticipation
  5. Keeping Leadership engaged and involved
  6. Managing through a “Communicate, tell, roundtable” method.
  7. Practicing your delivery.
  8. Ending Positively.

The Project Manager must have the ability to accurately, astutely and concisely convey project information and details to stakeholders, resources, vendors and third parties. Think of the care and precision with which a mother bird gathers and deposits an exact amount of food into each baby’s hungry mouth. It is with this care precision and accuracy that we as project managers must gather, integrate and disseminate information to our teams.

Here are eight great ways!

1. Know your audience

All project communication should be laser focused to an individual audience, which could be one or multiple people. What inspires and motivates one may offend another.  At project inception It’s a good idea to meet one-on -one with each team member to assess their comfort level with different communication vehicles. Experience has proven that individuals are extremely receptive to this dialogue and quite frankly surprised when PM’s take the time to go to such lengths. Up front planning in this respect establishes rapport and a path for effective, respectful dialogue, and eliminates risks and guesswork that would otherwise exist.

2. Be politically astute

The politically astute project manager utilizes effective communication to establish trust and authority as well as to motivate, influence and control.

Political effectiveness begins with knowing key project stakeholders and their goals and motivations. Who’s for and against you . . . who needs the project to succeed and who may want it to fail? Also remember that people respond to and are motivated by positivity.  Ask for suggestions, insight and assistance to solving an issue rather than leading with, “there is a problem.” This approach will greatly mitigate risks associated with interpersonal project issues.

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3. Establish your communication vehicle

Oftentimes, the communication vehicle chosen is as important as the message. Face to face interactions are preferred for those that value “extras” such as body language, the subtleties of facial expression, etc. Some individuals prefer to work strictly with E-mail messages. Once you’ve determined which vehicles are most appropriate, outline these in your communication Plan.

4. Timing & Anticipation

The unfortunate rule of timing is that “it depends,” but the general rule of thumb is to communicate sooner. Projects occur at a fast and furious rate, and keeping communication relevant and timely is paramount.

The ability to anticipate “next moves” and responses is an acquired skill. Consider your audience’s reaction to your communication and how this may shift the climate. Projects are often like chess matches; in this respect and knowing your “next move” is not only prudent, but required,  and an excellent risk avoidance technique.

5. Keep senior leadership engaged and involved

If your project has senior management’s attention, it’s your job to keep it. Neglecting to do so could be hazardous to your project’s health, as well as introduce support and momentum Risk. Remember to provide updates as to business viability, alignment with relevant strategic objectives, key issues and risks.  Also, while senior leadership should have access to project details, their concern and appetite is generally reserved for higher-level detail and information.

6. Communicate, tell, roundtable

For all meetings, have a specific agenda that outlines what the team will accomplish during the call or meeting. Communicate the topics that will be covered and the overall goal of the meeting. This conveys preparation to lead dictates purpose and direction and provides the opportunity for team members to speak up if there’s a topical question or additional clarification needed.

Now, cover each point and document all feedback.  At meeting close, summarize key points . . . tell them what you told them. Hold a “round-table” check-out where each team member has a final opportunity to provide feedback, ask questions, air complaints, etc. This is an informal way of making sure you have feedback and participation from all team members.

Post an immediate communication summary of each point discussed, key decisions reached, action items, owners, due dates and overall project team next steps. Key decisions are an important item and may later be used to justify a particular course of action. This can’t miss approach provides a timely and relevant chronological retrospective and mitigates communication risks.

7. Practice delivery

Consider attending toastmasters or offer to speak at a local chapter meeting on a topic you’re familiar with. This will further hone your communication and delivery skills. You’ll not be familiar with everyone in the room, which will bolster additional self-confidence when you nail the delivery.

8. End Positively

Effective communicators are adept at massaging information.  Just as a magician produces doves from a hat, the project manager can spin a negative message into something powerful and inspirational.

Remember to highlight individual and team accomplishments as well as recognize resource contributions … not necessarily just those that go above and beyond. This will provide the team with hope and a sustained sense of accomplishment.  The goal of the project manager is maintain positive momentum while reinforcing the projects goals and viability.

Make a point to end meetings and communications enthusiastically and on a positive up-swing. Remembering that teams feed off the energy and drive of the project manager and utilizing the ingredients will greatly reduce communication risks and allow you teams to benefit from your well-directed and razor- sharp communications!

The Multidimensional PM

Written by Sean Lowe on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on The Multidimensional PM

Competition within technical Innovation markets has never been more pronounced.

The ability for companies to grow and innovate is essential to survival. Business Processes need to be continually refined and improved and strategic initiatives executed. Alignment of Business and orgizational goals to the projects required to achieve them is paramount.

At the forefront of these efforts, and deep in the fray, exists the need for a very unique orgizational role, the project manager. For these reasons, requirements for success with innovation, growth and differentiation are placing a renewed emphasis on project management competency.

Recent research contends that interpersonal and intrapersonal skills “emotional intelligence (EI)” play a more important role than cognitive intelligence, particularly in determining personal success and engagement of people in the workplace. The following Personal competencies form a basis for predicting a person’s EI (Emotional Intelligence) potential:

  • Identifying emotions
  • Evaluating how others feel
  • Controlling one’s own emotions
  • Perceiving how others feel
  • Using emotions to facilitate social communication
  • Relating to others
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Are you getting frustrated or having difficulty with figuring out how members on your teams feel about their work and roles on projects and why? Do you find engaging team members socially to be challenging and emotionally demanding? The truth is that many project managers struggle with the social and emotional dimensions of managing the human component of projects. Failure to recognize and improve upon emotional intelligence shortcomings dramatically increases your Risk of PM of career failure.

Signs your emotional intelligence is at Risk and needs honing, include:

  • Lack of empathy for others
  • Inability to control ones temper or emotions
  • Refusing to acknowledge others’ points of view
  • Transferring blame and the inability to take responsibility for your actions

Conversely, here are a few signs you have high emotional intelligence:

You:

  • Are very curious
  • Have exemplary leadership skills
  • Are in tune with your own strengths and weaknesses.
  • Make helping others a priority
  • Are adept at understanding facial cues and expressions.
  • Are an excellent judge of character

Regardless of where you fall on the Emotional intelligence spectrum, there’s good news!
There are many options and resources available for working to increase your Emotional Intelligence.

Once you understand more about where you fall on the EI spectrum you’ll be able to hone your Leadership style around areas that may need attention.

An Emotionally Intelligent Leadership style will allow you to not only make assignments based on the unique personalities, goals, and backgrounds your team members possess, but to understand, connect and communicate on new levels.

This progression will foster professional growth, trust and understanding and greatly enhance interpersonal success and engagement while mitigating the Risk of becoming a one-dimensional project manager.

Risk and Opportunity Management

Written by Sean Lowe on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Risk and Opportunity Management

When asked how typical risk management exercises are conducted, most project managers reply that this involves conversations and documentation around risk events and their respective probabilities and impacts.

While this is a necessary and beneficial exercise, this standard approach and mind-set does not account for taking time to recognize and focus on maximizing opportunities, and it often leads the team and project manager in the opposite direction.

Effective risk management should not be focused solely on recognizing possible failure points, but also on learning how to best recognize and capitalize on opportunities to ensure both project and future success.

Opportunity Management is about removing barriers to success and creating a path for yourself and your teams. Make sure you create time not only to identify and deal with risk, but also to recognize and capitalize on opportunities in your projects.

Chances are this change in perspective will enable you to see multiple opportunities that may not have arisen otherwise.

Enumerated here are six opportunities that nearly every project manager, regardless of discipline, can and should capitalize upon.

  1. Take the opportunity to recognize and reward success.

Successful projects are always the result of successful teams. Successful teams are the result of the collaboration and efforts of motivated and talented individuals. The project manager must maximize all opportunities to recognize and reward team success.

This can be challenging in today’s marketplace given the tremendous financial emphasis on budgets and spending. In tough economic markets, don’t discount the importance of direct individual feedback.

  1. Take the opportunity to provide and ask for feedback.

Feedback is an incredibly powerful, yet often overlooked opportunity that can be utilized with peers, direct reports management vendors and senior management as well. Many project managers realize the importance of providing feedback to functional managers but fail to maximize opportunities that may arise from asking for feedback.

The important thing to keep in mind is that people always remember how they were treated and made to feel, long after the American Express gift checks are spent. We as project managers are in a unique position to provide both constructive criticism and praise to both team members as well as their functional management.

It is the project manager’s responsibility to stand up for team members to ensure that their best interests are represented.

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  1. Take the opportunity to network with professional project managers in your field regarding lessons learned.

Most professional project managers aren’t shy about sharing lessons learned, opportunities they’ve maximized and those they’ve missed along the way!

Take the opportunity to share experiences as well as to learn from others. Local PMI chapters, special interest groups and LinkedIn are but a few of the many ways to accomplish this. These lessons learned could very well be the result of feedback from number two, above!

  1. Take the opportunity to utilize and involve senior leadership and your sponsor.

Never underestimate the value of the project sponsor when it comes to removing obstacles to get things done. People tend to listen a bit more intently when senior leadership speaks.

Allow them to be engaged and assist with removing barriers and obstacles. Project initiation is also a great time to have candid conversations with leadership about their vision for the project as well as opportunities they foresee. This also affords you the opportunity to highlight movement toward and capitalization on said opportunities in status meetings.

  1. Take the opportunity to recognize cultural boundaries, international holidays and cultural differences, etc.

Most teams these days are a veritable melting pot of cultures and time zones. As such, communicating and determining a mutually agreeable time for the team to meet often presents many challenges and opportunities.

The project manager should take the opportunity to build rapport with international team members and stakeholders by learning about international holidays as well as working off-hours to account for different country’s time zones.

  1. Encourage Opportunity Management within your teams.

This demonstrates to the team that you not only value their input but are willing to recognize and implement it toward the success of the project.

Everyone has unique perspectives and insights regarding opportunities within the project—oftentimes all you have to do is ask.

Capitalizing on these six opportunities will assist with building rapport within team as well as provide the project manager and team with valuable and timely information beyond conventional risk exercises.

Becoming a Risk Hero

Written by Sean Lowe on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Becoming a Risk Hero

Risk management can be a deep, cavernous and potentially career-limiting endeavor if not properly planned.

Unfortunately, project managers often approach risk in a purely one-dimensional fashion, without considering many essential components such as the company risk climate, the project’s strategic fit, key player and stakeholder involvement and buy-in. Ensuring risk ownership, addressing supply-chain concerns and utilizing applicable lessons learned and historical documentation from previous projects will greatly reduce project management plan updates and the havoc of risks on your initiative.

Step 1—Understand Company Risk Climate

This is somewhat akin to a writer’s need to understand his or her audience. There are companies that seem to simply thrive on responding to situations as they arise as opposed to doing anything pre-emptive. This could be because there are project managers at these companies who have honed their reactionary skills into Ninja-like firefighting weapons. In these environments reactionary heroism is praised and the very mention of risks or “bad things” that could happen is discouraged. Conversely, more risk “evolved” companies have woven risk ownership, management and governance into their organizational fabric. Having a complete understanding of where the company fits on this continuum is the first step in planning an appropriate risk management approach and to becoming a Risk Hero.

Step 2—Understand Your Project’s Strategic Fit

Projects are either initiated from within silos and in reaction to specific business needs or as part of a planned set of projects under a program umbrella. Regardless of which is the case, in order to create an effective risk strategy, managers must be aware of the existence of success criteria and constraints and those of neighboring projects. Without this insight, one is indeed blind as to whether the project is moving in the right direction to meet overall business goals, or simply speeding toward a collision with a neighboring project. Understanding the strategic fit equips the informed project manager with insights on potential risk events as well as their potential impact. With understanding of risk continuum position and foresight regarding strategic fit, you don’t have to rely on reactive heroics to keep items from colliding.

Step 3—Ensure the Right Players and Stakeholders Are Engaged

It is important to be aware of the broad spectrum of possible risks. Certainly, the aforementioned investment in strategic fit will pay dividends here as knowledge of business dependencies, predecessors and successor projects will flesh out risks. Engagement of resources and stakeholders across multiple lines of business is beneficial as well, as multiple varieties of project risk exist within seemingly one-dimensional projects. Your project may seem highly technical on the surface, but many non-technical risks could adversely affect its success. In this case, not having the right players and stakeholders at the table could mean a very lopsided view of risks. Thoroughly review your stakeholder list to make sure you’ve accounted for key individuals and groups, as well as who is counting on the project to succeed and who might benefit from its failure.

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Step 4—Secure Buy-In From Key Players and Stakeholders

With an understanding of risk continuum position, strategic fit and with the right players in place, you’ll be well positioned to articulate your strategy and secure stakeholder buy-in. Regardless of your company’s position on the continuum, the following approach is recommended:
Always utilize relevant fact-based risk events. This will be particularly important in reaching the risk- heroes and reactionary managers mentioned earlier, as it’s difficult to argue against facts.

Reference historically similar risks, approaches and cost savings. Stress the importance of early action and determine the opposing “cost of waiting” for the risk event to materialize. These costs could be financial, resource related, etc. Consider previous strategies employed (accept, mitigate, avoid, transfer, etc.).
Explain how your risk approach is designed to work and exactly what it is designed to do (be agile, relevant, easy, fact based).

Step 5—Consider Supply and Demand Issues

How many times have supply-chain issues derailed your “well-thought-out” project? The point here is to consider each of the “pain points” in your supply chain when crafting your risk management plan. Supply- chain disruptions and issues can significantly derail your projects, not to mention impact revenue and market share and damage the credibility of your company.

Step 6—Establish Clear Risk Ownership

It’s simply not enough to conduct a one-time session to identify risks, determine their probability, impact and response strategy. Someone needs to continually monitor each risk to determine changes to its probability and overall impact. This is particularly relevant in cases where a follow-on project requires completion of specific deliverables to enable the successor project to initiate.

Ownership and accountability need to be distributed across the project team and not be solely the responsibility of the project manager. Creating an atmosphere of risk ownership and accountability is a necessary step in organizational risk awareness and evolution. Individual risk events identified must have individual owners. Risk-evolved companies do not rely on siloed heroics, but on more integrated, strategic and proactive measures. Communicate to the team where the project fits, where it’s headed and ask them about opportunities that may be capitalized on as well.

Step 7—Utilize Risk Lessons Learned and Historical Documentation

Project risk lessons learned are invaluable sources of information and should be utilized whenever possible. Make use of all applicable risk-registers, plans and historical data as well. Change records for similar projects can be wonderful sources of information too.

Conclusion

Following each of the aforementioned steps will demonstrate to your team and stakeholders that you’ve done your homework and refuse to resort to reactionary heroics. These strategic due-diligence steps will enable an informed, educated and timely approach to risk and position you as a company Risk Hero.

The six headed uncertainty Hydra

Written by Sean Lowe on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on The six headed uncertainty Hydra

Project closure can be bittersweet. A long and perhaps arduous endeavor has been completed, which is very satisfying.

The bitterness may come from the fact that you’ve already started your next assignment(s) and are in the throes of simultaneously conducting a post mortem and lessons learned. Many project managers, present company included … struggle, or used to struggle with the task of rapidly assembling a comprehensive project re-cap. The least of these tasks certainly not being recalling key project decisions, their exact timing, strategic implications, who sat at the decision table and the specifics of their decision making authority of each.

What if there were a guiding document that outlined parties and the specifics of their decision making authority as well as an associated chronological register of their key project decisions? Enter the Key Decision Matrix/Record! This tool can reside on two spreadsheet tabs, in a database, or via other automation available to the project team.

Why do I need this tool? Well, without it, you’re at Risk of not surviving a battle with the six-headed uncertainty Hydra. The six headed what, you ask? The six headed uncertainty Hydra is the crazed beast that charges at you during random project phases, especially closure, its multiple heads hungrily snapping at you for details that may or may not be buried in meeting minutes, multiple email correspondences, action item lists, etc. What decisions were made, and when? Why were these decisions made and what options were considered? What are the implications to adjacent projects and who was appointed to make these decisions?

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OK, let’s review the details of each section.

The Key Decision Matrix/Record is comprised of the following elements:

1. A list of Project Key Decision makers and the specifics of their decision making authority.

There are no rabbits in hats, here … and this is intended to be exactly as stated. From experience, you may encounter some resistance in documenting and formalizing this but it pays off in the end. Part of the reason for this is that for some reason, folks are somewhat hesitant to document specifics regarding decision making authority. This exercise also almost always promises to be eye opening for the PM, as they either end up having much more, or less “stated authority” than previously surmised.

2. An explanation if each Key Decision

This is the essential detail regarding the decision in question. Pay special attention to technical details if necessary as the more complete the explanation the better (multiple personnel may need to reference this document).

3. Specific dates and phases of occurrence

Making note of specific dates when key decisions were made lends historical significance to project milestones and will greatly assist in re-constructing timelines (if required) at a later date.

4. Why the Key decision was made and options considered, if any?

While each element of the decision record is important, capturing specifics regarding options considered, as well as why the final decision (option) was chosen will be particularly beneficial reference points.

5. Parties Privy to the decision

Number one, above, documents Project Key Decision makers and the specifics of their decision making authority. This section, however, specifically denotes which parties participated in and made each particular decision.

6. Decision Implications

The importance of this section is to document integration points, decision implications and how your project’s key decisions may affect neighboring projects.

Armed with this guiding document, facing and slaying the six headed uncertainty Hydra will require no more than referencing your Key Decision Matrix/Record. Furthermore, completing Post Mortem and Lessons Learned exercises will also be a snap.