Supporting Your Sponsor’s Decision Making

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Sponsor decision making

Photo by Scott Trento on Unsplash

Sponsors provide financial support, champion the project and make key decisions. So, it’s crucial that you understand how your project sponsors make decisions. By watching for these types of decision-making, you can adjust your approach to get the best decisions and support your project’s success.

  • Fact-based decisions. Project sponsors want facts and data they can use to guide their decisions. For fact-based decision-makers, you need to know the data sources they value most. For example, internal trusted advisors or external entities like consulting companies. Find the data and the data source that your sponsor values to help them make decisions.
  • Intuition-based decisions. Leaders with sponsorship experience are often swayed by their intuition, which helps produce quick decisions. To support this type of sponsor, identify when they’re using intuition for decisions and then validate the assumptions they make. That way, you reduce the risk that flawed intuition presents.
  • Decisions based on team experiences. Many sponsors will poll their team members before making decisions, because they value the team’s experiences and opinions. This typically results in more buy-in from the project team. However, attempts to  gain consensus can delay decisions. For this approach, add buffer time to the schedule to offset these delays.
  • Political decisions. All too often, sponsors make project decisions from a political standpoint. Their bosses or other key stakeholders have expectations and sponsors hesitate to make decisions that may disappoint those stakeholders. While these decisions can be sound, they may add risks. Work with your sponsor to make sure you both understand those risks and their potential impact.
  • Market-driven decisions. The driving force for a sponsor’s decision making could be what’s happening in the marketplace. That makes sense because project success often depends on leap-frogging the competition. With a market-driven sponsor, keep a close eye on the status of the triple constraints (scope, cost, and time). Scope is often fixed, so you need to watch how that affects cost and schedule.

Have you seen other types of decision-making? If so, what advantages and disadvantages did they present? What can you do in those situations? Share with us in the comments section.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 33,000 subscribers. If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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What If I Don’t Agree with the Project Business Case?

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What should you do if you don’t agree with the project business case? The answer depends on what about it makes you uncomfortable.

The project business case is the foundation for the project. Get it wrong and the likelihood of a successful project is low.  Here are four issues you might have about the business case and what you can do in each situation.

  • If you believe the business case data lacks integrity: Immediately discuss your concern with your sponsor. Compare your experiences with what’s in the business case and work through the differences. Be upfront about how your experiences differ from what’s in the case and the concerns you have because of your intuition. The business case sets expectations, so you’ll eventually compare project outcomes against the business case. Don’t wait until the end of the project to challenge the business case. Act now!
  • If you’re concerned the business case is too risky: Identify your sponsor’s risk profile. Your role is to ensure your sponsor and key stakeholders understand the project risks. Your role is NOT to ensure risk goes away. When you’re concerned with business case risk, point out the risks to stakeholders and develop response plans. Focus on the costs of executing those response plans. When you understand the level of comfort your sponsor has with risks and potential costs, you can support the business case accordingly.
  • If the business case was not built collaboratively: Review the business case with key stakeholders. They usually focus on their own interests and perceptions of risk and may be uncomfortable with the business case or its approaches. Hold discussions to analyze and align the business case with key stakeholders. Moving forward with a business case that hasn’t been reviewed and agreed upon makes it difficult to get staffing and decision-making support.
  • If the business case doesn’t address a specific problem or business opportunity (the WHY of the project is unclear): Ask your sponsor and key stakeholders questions to try to discover any alignment around the purpose of the project. In the interest of scope and clarifying the WHY for the project, recommend edits to the business case. If those recommendations are approved, transfer those clarifications into the Project Charter. If you can’t find alignment on a purpose, recommend against launching the project. If the sponsor decides to go forward with the project, add a risk related to identifying the purpose of the project. Ensure you include risk review points where scope expectation differences could cause trouble.

Have you found other issues with project business cases? What were they and how did you deal with them? Share with us in the comments section.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 32,000 subscribers. If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Dealing with Strained Relationships Between Senior Leaders

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business meeting

Photo by Cherrydeck on Unsplash

As a project manager, you need healthy relationships with influential senior leaders. That can involve dealing with relationship issues between those leaders. Here are pointers for dealing with strained relationships between senior leaders that can impact your project.

  • Understand the issues and impacts to your project. Resolving issues between senior leaders isn’t your job as a project manager. Don’t go there. You’ll waste your time. Instead, figure out what the issues are and how they might impact your project. That way, you can share those impacts as risks and work with your sponsor and the leaders to choose your response to handle them. Share when the risks are coming to fruition and launch your risk response. This approach may lessen the issues between senior stakeholders — at least as far as the project is concerned.
  • Leverage 1-1 meetings with senior stakeholders. Discuss the positive aspects and negative impacts of your project with influential stakeholders so you can understand the senior leaders’ perspectives.  That way, you can avoid unexpected concerns. Use this understanding to develop an approach that helps your project deliver the best outcomes for everyone. This might also reduce the impact of conflicts between senior leaders.
  • Refine your scope. When tension between stakeholders involves business concerns, design the project to minimize those concerns. Well-developed scope statements can address tensions around business priorities, process handoffs between departments, and process inefficiencies. If your project doesn’t address those concerns, propose a phase 2 or follow-on project to address your influential stakeholders’ needs.
  • Be a neutral supporter. Stakeholders who feel listened to are more likely to cooperate with project team members. You can enhance that support by understanding their issues and concerns, and then communicating that in your project. Key point! When stakeholders are in conflict, support them equally. You don’t want to be perceived as biased or favoring one stakeholder’s concerns over another’s. Informally share things you may learn during the project in 1-1 conversations, for example, an idea for streamlining a business process. This is more timely and personal than waiting for that information to be conveyed in a status report.

Do you have experience dealing with strained stakeholder relationships? If so, I’m sorry to hear that. If you have questions or solutions, share with us in the comments section.

For more about stakeholder management, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s Managing Project Stakeholders course.

Coming Up

On March 20, 2023, at 12PM MT, I’m joining Angela Wick on a live broadcast to talk about how project managers and business analysts work together. It’s going to be fun and informative. Bring your questions! To sign up, click this link. https://www.linkedin.com/events/7036184580965470208/about/

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 31,000 subscribers. If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Managing Change in an Agile Environment

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Some people might think agile project methodologies aren’t disciplined because things change a lot. Au contraire! Agile totally supports change control and management.

  • Agile methodologies are designed for change. The scope for an agile project isn’t fixed at the start. And, the project team expects changes with each iteration. Stakeholders add, drop, and change the priority of backlog items. Changes are made with the participation of technical and business stakeholders. Bottom line, instead of trying to eliminate change, agile approaches are designed to manage it effectively.
  • Reviews are key to agile. Agile approaches encourage continuous feedback from stakeholders, which identifies and addresses changes. Features are tested as they are developed. Desk reviews and consultation are at the heart of agile processes. And stakeholders get to continually review alternatives for feature builds. This encourages useful changes, so they aren’t major obstacles down the line.
  • Stakeholders recommend and collaboratively approve changes. It’s always important to make sure unapproved changes don’t find their way into projects. In agile methodologies, frequent collaborative sessions like scrum meetings ensure stakeholders concur with changes — so changes are made transparently and effectively.
  • Change is validated with agile, because it’s based on empirical learning. The basis of agile is that stakeholders will learn from early deliverables, which then generates pragmatic improvements to future deliverables. Features can be added, adjusted, or modified as the project unfolds. These changes come about from actual experience. Changes are recommended by the stakeholders who will use project deliverables.. As a result, it’s rare that any change requests are misinterpreted or create stakeholder adoption issues.

In essence, agile handles changes easily and supports sound change control and management. Stakeholders are involved through feedback and consultation. Changes aren’t made without approval. And those changes almost always help the business.

 

Are there other ways that agile supports change that I’ve missed? Do you have questions about change control and management in agile methodologies. Join the conversation in the comments section!

 

For more about change with agile, check out Christina Charenkova’s Managing Change in an Agile Environment course.

Coming Up

On March 20, 2023, at 12PM MT, I’m joining Angela Wick to talk about how project managers and business analysts work together. It’s going to be fun and informative. Bring your questions! To sign up, click this link.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 30,000 subscribers. If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Shape Stakeholder Perceptions with Your Status Reports

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Photo by Lukas Blazek from Unsplash

Communication is a keystone of project management. Shaping perceptions of your project should is an important part of project communication and the best tool for this is your status report. Here are powerful ways your project status report can influence stakeholders’ perception.

  • Describe opportunities. Risks aren’t always negative! Opportunities are positive events with a probability of enhancing your project. To leave a positive impression on stakeholders, share what you’re doing to bring an opportunity to fruition in your status report.
  • Describe dodged risks. Highlighting risks that you side-stepped can also create a favorable impression. Whether the risk didn’t occur or you took action to address it isn’t important. You can build confidence in the project and your management by sharing risks that are no longer a concern. Of course, you should continue to report on risks that could still impact the project. This demonstrates project management diligence.
  • Note relevant task completions. To help manage perception, go beyond “tick the box, got it done” status items. Identify breakthroughs in how tasks are completed. Explain any innovative activities. Share when significant tasks are completed. And include the significance of the task completion. Also, describe how those task completions enables project outcomes. 
  • Highlight project team members’ backgrounds. Include a team member profile in every status report. It’s a simple, quick, and easy way to heighten stakeholder confidence. Describe the team member’s expertise and don’t forget to include contract personnel, who might not be known to your key stakeholders. 
  • Boost exposure to preliminary deliverables. Highlight the completion of preliminary deliverables, and when feasible, show them off! Nothing boosts confidence more than demonstrating deliverables. Although many completed deliverables can’t be fully utilized, share them any way you can! If the deliverable is a physical one, arrange a viewing. In the case of a building section, arrange a tour. If it’s an information technology system, set up a demo. Stakeholders find project outcomes more believable when there is a tangible item to examine.

Do you have other sections that you include in your status reports to mould stakeholder perception? How does that information help? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about project reports, check out Doug Rose’s Project Management Foundations: Communication course.