Negotiating Project Deadlines

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Have you ever had to negotiate a project deadline with your project sponsor? It’s daunting, but being prepared makes the interaction easier. Here are my top four tips for preparing to negotiate a project deadline.

  • Identify what’s driving the deadline. Ask questions about desired deadlines and what drives those dates. It could be a legal mandate, a desire to beat a competitor to the market, or pressure from the Board of Directors. By understanding the deadline pressures, you can address those considerations head-on. Adjusting the scope or bringing in experts might help you meet a mandatory deadline.
  • Research your project. To negotiate effectively, you need to know as much as you can about the project, particularly the project timeline, staffing challenges, scope, and potential risks. Don’t discuss deadlines until you complete that homework, so your discussion can be more informed and meaningful. If your negotiation identifies other items or risks, ask for time to research them.

Giving a timeframe without doing research is irresponsible. It would be like your car mechanic telling you what’s wrong with your car and quoting $1200 without looking at it. You probably wouldn’t trust that estimate! So, look under the hood before you agree to an estimate and project deadline.

  • It’s the sponsor’s project! Negotiation should be about sharing information and coming up with the best outcome. The result could be an aggressive project deadline. Remember, it isn’t the project manager’s job to prevent the sponsor from taking risks. Your job is to make sure the sponsor understands the risks they’re taking and the associated impacts. Try proposing alternative solutions that could make the deadline more achievable. This can include staffing, scope reduction, or delivering the project in stages.
  • Document assumptions. Once you have agreed upon a deadline, be sure to capture any assumptions you’ve made, such as staffing levels from operational personnel. Often, operational staff members get pulled from a project into day-to-day business dealings, which impacts your project progress and puts the deadline at risk. Other assumptions could be the availability of certain technologies or vendors to assist with project deliverables. Ensure that your sponsor and key stakeholders understand these assumptions. Track progress against these assumptions and report when any deviation occurs. That way, you can react to make corrections to meet your deadline.  

Do you have other tips for negotiating deadlines? Have you come across obstacles with deadlines that you don’t know how to resolve. Add your comments and questions to 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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Supporting Your Sponsor’s Decision Making

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Sponsor decision making

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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

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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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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.

Project Feasibility Studies – Do’s and Don’ts

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Feasibility studies help to show the potential viability of a proposed project. A feasibility study should recommend initiating a project if business conditions are right. If conditions aren’t right, the study should help management understand the risk they’re taking if they approve the project anyway. Here are do’s and don’ts when you run a project feasibility study.

+ Do focus on risks. The purpose of a project feasibility study is to identify and understand project risks. Provide management with a detailed description of the risks you identify along with mitigation activities that could be used to reduce them.  Also be sure to include opportunities (positive risks) that the project provides.

x Don’t skip risks that you consider insignificant. A feasibility study should identify circumstances the project might encounter. That means you need to include all risks, even the ones of lesser concern. With these less significant risks, explain why you believe they aren’t important. This shows you’ve been thorough in the feasibility study.

+ Do share the likely path the project will take. Telling a story is the best way to do this. When management sees how the project might run through a believable story, you can ease their concerns and help a reasonable project move forward.

+ Do include an executive summary. Storytelling doesn’t typically start by giving away the ending. But, it’s a good idea in a project feasibility study. Executives appreciate high-level overviews.

+ Do build a milestone plan. A milestone plan enhances your project story and highlights the approach you think makes the project feasible.

x Don’t create anything deeper than the milestone plan. You still don’t have enough information to do that. One thing a feasibility study does is determine whether you should undertake a deeper planning exercise.

+ Do understand what the person who will approve the project cares about most. Think about the triple constraints of time, scope, and cost. Talk with project approver(s) to determine which of those constraints is the most critical. Make sure everyone understands how those constraints will affect project viability.

x Don’t neglect the less important project constraints. Of course, you want to emphasize what is most important. But finish the job. Describe how all the triple constraints might affect the project quality.

+ Do focus on external factors that might affect the project. It isn’t only the conditions within your organization that can affect a project. Evaluate and describe external factors, like market conditions, as well.

x Don’t skip things like environmental and community concerns. These can be make-or-break items when it comes to project delivery.

+ Do make assumptions during your feasibility analysis if necessary. There are too many variables to research to cover everything. Do a thorough feasibility study. If a “deep dive” is needed to validate a point, make an assumption and be sure to mention in the documentation that you made an assumption. (You can also provide detail how you could validate the assumption.)

Do you have any other tips – or questions – about feasibility studies? Other results that help feasible projects get approved and weed out the rest? Share with us in the comments! 

With Difficult Risks, Consider Your Options

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Risk management can be difficult when risks are hard to address. Some difficult risks are abandoned too quickly as unmanageable when they could be addressed. Be persistent! Here are four approaches to consider when you are struggling to derive a response to a risk.

  • Try to reduce the probability or impact if the risk occurs. People often think risk management is eliminating risks. Many difficult risks can’t be eliminated. But there are might be actions that can make the risk more manageable. You might be able to reduce the risk’s probability of occurring or its impact if it occurs. OK, this is common practice. But people often don’t do this for difficult risks. Why? Because they assume the impact reduction will be minimal. Instead, do some research to determine what the reductions truly are. For example, time buffers in your schedule can address schedule impacts. Contingency funding can reduce cost impacts. Even a 10 or 20% cost reduction in the risk impact can make a difference at the end of your project.
  • Think about who might be able to help. Maybe you can’t address a risk yourself. But someone else might be able to. Contact them. If you can’t do that yourself, look for a common connection who might put you in touch. People are often happy to help if they can. For example, a colleague of mine asked a local government official to address a risk. The official made an exception which helped the project. Because of their discussion, the council passed updates to local laws, which made many projects easier to deliver. 
  • Explore scope alternatives. Teams often become attached to their approach to completing a project. The scope can become inflexible for no good reason. Often multiple approaches could work to deliver the desired scope. Maybe a different approach to delivering that scope would reduce risk.

Also, some parts of project scope might be less important. Look at removing riskier, less important scope elements. And check whether the adjusted scope delivers enough business value. One word of warning though. People often react negatively to scope reductions because they want the benefits from the scope. Perform a pragmatic analysis of the risks and benefits. But, if achieving those benefits introduces undue risk, they may not be worth it. Do your homework to figure out if the benefits are worth the risk. And if they aren’t, determine whether reduced scope still benefits the business.

  • Conduct progressive status checks, while considering plan alternatives. Let me share a story. There was a project that would benefit by using a software product due for release in four months. The project had a 12-month schedule. Planning on using unreleased software is high risk. To address this risk, the project team took four actions.
    • They developed all aspects of the scope that didn’t depend on the unreleased software.
    • They planned regular status checks on the progress of the new software. In those checks, they focused on any changes to the release date and client reactions to beta test results.
    • They determined the latest date they could wait to buy the new software without impacting their deadline.
    • They planned a way to deliver most of their project scope without the new software–just in case the new software was delayed or didn’t live up to expectations.

These actions reduced risk. The project team could take advantage of the new software if feasible. If not, they had an alternative approach to deliver most of the scope.

Have you had success with other approaches for handling difficult risks? Are you struggling with a risk you can’t figure out how to handle? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments section.

For more about risk management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Risk course.

Coming up:

Want to improve your project management and don’t know where to start? I’m a guest on Kim Kaupe’s Coffee with Kim series to talk about what it takes to go from good to great as a superstar project manager. 👉🏼 What can you do to increase the success of your projects? 👉🏼 How do you keep a virtual team on the same page? 👉🏼 What skills should project managers aim to level up in 2023? Here’s the link to sign up: https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:7026641716040355840/

Do You Need to Re-estimate Your Whole Project?

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Estimating projects is never easy. There are too many variables. Team performance can be inconsistent. And even with sound risk management, issues arise. These variables can require adjustments to estimates for part of a project. Sometimes, re-estimating the entire project might be in order. Here are circumstances when a complete project re-estimation is in order.

  • Scope changes by more than 20%. In managing project change, you examine the implications of a single proposed change and propose whether to approve or reject the change based on its cost and benefits. Each change is evaluated on its individual merits. What doesn’t occur is an overall evaluation of the project after many changes have been approved. Multiple changes can increase risk and complexity and the need for personnel and contract management. So, if your project has increased by 20% or more from its original scope, it’s time to re-estimate the remaining project work to assess the aggregate impact of all the changes. That way, you ensure the project is still appropriate for the business.
  • Critical team members change. In most projects, there will be business and/or technical team members who are critical to success. If a critical team member changes, you might consider re-estimating the project. You might need multiple people to replace that team member. Or the replacement will be an expensive contracted resource. Either way, you might end up with significant unplanned costs. The replacement resource might take longer to deliver their assignments due to a lack of internal business knowledge. Re-estimating after critical personnel changes ensures realistic expectations for the project.
  • The project has varied by 30% or more from your initial project estimate. Don’t continue to use an estimate that isn’t accurate enough. If you’re variance is over 30% from your original estimate, it’s time to re-evaluate the project’s viability. Revisit all your estimates. Use the difference between actual performance and your estimates to revise remaining work estimates. Look for opportunities to cut scope. While you want to deliver value to offset the money you have spent, it may not be feasible. The project should continue only if future spending will justify the business value.
  • The project intent changes. Projects can go a different direction due to business strategy changes. Or a change of sponsor can alter your project’s direction. The priority of requirements can change or new requirements arise. The team members and project name are the same, but you could be managing a very different project. If so, it’s time to re-estimate! Evaluate risks and examine the tasks needed to meet the revised expectations, so you can verify that the altered project can meet business expectations.

Have you ever re-estimated an entire project? If so, why, and how did that turn out. Share with us in the comments section. 

For more about estimating, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Working with a Sponsorship Committee

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Sometimes, the time and extent of authority needed to sponsor a project is beyond what one person can handle. In that case, a sponsorship committee is the answer. Here are tips for working with a sponsorship committee.

  • Request an individual to represent the committee when you need quick responses. At times, you will need a quick decision. Communicating with multiple sponsors is time-consuming, so it’s important to have a single sponsorship representative you can contact on short notice. That person can make decisions for the project, or they can poll other committee members if needed.
  • Propose logistics for the committee. A project manager can’t dictate how steering committee logistics will work, but the committee usually appreciates reasonable recommendations. Consider the priority and risk elements of the project. Then propose meeting frequency, definition of a quorum, and a standard agenda. The committee may not adopt your suggestions. But proposing sound logistics increases the chances things will run smoothly. Sound logistics also centralize communications, easing the burden on the project manager.
  • Strive for a single set of priorities. Work with the sponsorship committee to develop a common set of project priorities. If you’re lucky, members of the committee will agree on the priority of project requirements and the relative importance of project constraints (cost, time, scope, and quality). Hold discussions early to identify potential conflicts. These talks can set the stage for future debates and decision making.
  • Propose a decision-making process. It’s important for the committee to agree upon a decision-making process. Will all decisions require a consensus, or is a majority decision acceptable? Will a committee chairperson break ties or logjams? Agreeing to a decision-making process in advance saves considerable time. Without a process, needed decisions might not be made. Influential stakeholders in conflict can kill a project whether you have one or several sponsors. An unmade decision could stall or halt projects,  as the committee tries to develop a decision-making process and make a controversial decision at the same time.
  • Define the relationship between the sponsorship and steering committees. Many organizations appoint a steering committee for major projects. Members are typically key managers and customer personnel. Things can get confusing when you have both a steering committee and a sponsorship committee. So, it’s wise to draft a mission statement for the steering committee and one for the sponsorship committee, explaining how the committees work together. This can avoid confusion about where project related decisions will be made.

Have you ever worked with a sponsorship committee? What were the pros and cons? If you have tips or questions about sponsorship committees, share with us in the comments section.

For more about working with sponsors, check out my Project Management Foundations course.