Sometimes you must deal with someone who opposes your project. Here are tips to handle this uncomfortable and quite common situation:

Don’t ignore it. This issue isn’t going away. It’s crucial to fully understand the opposition to your project and address it. Otherwise, the opposition will intensify and become more difficult to manage. If you need help doing that, ask your sponsor for support. Keep dialogue open with your opposing stakeholder and representatives of their organization, so you can learn as much as you can to resolve their concerns.

Focus on business benefits and risks.  Project opposition often comes from misunderstandings or fear of change. Compare the opposition to your project against the benefits. Treat concerns as risks and work on mitigation strategies. Include people who both support and oppose the project as you derive risk and risk response strategies. As your project progresses, ensure your status reports provide detail to inform both project supporters and opponents. Project opponents who aren’t informed are likely to escalate their concerns with your project – so keep the status reports flowing to all interested parties.

Build a solid business case.  Ensure the business case provides a view of the benefits for the overall business. Leverage supportive stakeholders to help highlight your business case.  Items that benefit some stakeholders can create concerns for others. Ensure your sponsor is aware of any concerns so they can help counter roadblocks created by skeptical stakeholders.

Seek opportunities to support your concerned stakeholder. Understanding your stakeholder’s concerns can surface ideas for future projects that will provide benefits. Helping them build a business case for a follow-on project will help you preserve your relationship and further advance your business. It also demonstrates your ability to see the big picture in your business environment.

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

This post contains affiliate links, and I will be compensated if you click my links and make a purchase.

The right team leaders can help make your project a success. Here are sound strategies for assigning team leaders to your project. 

Add strength to your project leadership. Look for people who compliment and expand your skills. Be realistic about your own skills and how others can augment them. Tell your team leaders how their strengths can support you and the project. 

Increase visibility. Team leaders with visibility to critical stakeholders can help you promote your project in addition to providing critical skills. Shrewd project managers leverage relationships between team leaders and key stakeholders to review potential project priorities and directions. Team leaders can also obtain early opinions and impressions on project deliverables as they are being produced.

Instil confidence. People who are widely trusted add value as team leaders, because the organization is likely to follow their lead regarding changes or decisions. These confidence-building team leads might act as part-time deliverable reviewers. Their reviewer role provides a valuable quality check and can also boost stakeholder confidence. 

A Reality check – team leaders are often chosen for you. Managers often assign team leaders to your project. Therefore, it is important to develop good relationships with the managers who provide resources. Use the tips provided here as rationale when negotiating to get the best people assigned to your project. If your preferred resources aren’t made available, seek to have them assigned on “stand by” for risk mitigation purposes in the event you run into project issues. 

For more about resource management, check out Chris Croft’s Managing Resources Across Project Teams course.

This post contains affiliate links, and I will be compensated if you click my links and make a purchase.

SMART guidelines are used to assess requirements in waterfall projects. They apply to agile projects as well:

Specific. In Agile, it doesn’t exist initially. Specific relates to the final product. Requirements are captured during development, not documented in advance. However, the end result typically goes beyond the detail and specificity of traditional requirements. When broad  requirements aren’t specific, they are typically broken down into several features in Agile, each of which provides specific functionality and can be more easily produced.

Measurable. The construction and evaluation of each feature focuses on measuring effectiveness. One of the most significant benefits of Agile is that performance and suitability measurement reviews are built into the development process. With a mindset towards prototyping, Agile features can be evaluated by users prior to implementation. When that cannot be done directly, for example, when a totally new business process is being created, the user-developer partnership used to build features in Agile reduces the risk of items failing to meet measurable business objectives.

Achievable. Feature sizing and prioritization ensures that achievability is regularly assessed. Features are examined for their integrity and ability to be produced during a sprint. Larger features are broken down into pieces that are more easily created, enhancing achievability. When the features can’t be broken down into manageable pieces, that’s a sign that they aren’t achievable. The developers and users can examine these features in real time to determine how critical they are and explore other ways to address the corresponding business need.

Realistic. In Agile, features are developed and accepted iteratively and in real time, versus weeks or months after requirements are documented in the traditional approach.  Agile lends itself to realistic outcomes and can accommodate the latest changes to business needs. The nature of Agile means the team learns about features and their capabilities more deeply, allowing users to make features more business-friendly. Feature capabilities have greater integrity and support better business processes.

Time-constrained. The sprint schedule is ideal for ensuring time constraints are placed on feature creation. In addition, there is the added value of being able to easily change timeframes when business priorities change. Reprioritization and re-stacking of features for each sprint provide an ongoing focus on development timeframes. While this time management approach isn’t perfect, features that require more time than anticipated to develop are re-evaluated and assigned to subsequent sprints as agreed by the Agile team.

For more about Agile, check out Doug Rose’s Agile Foundations course.

Great project managers always seem the get the best people for their projects. What’s their secret? Establishing relationships with management works best:

You sell your project directly. With a good relationship, you can discuss in detail the benefits and drawbacks of the project as well as the development opportunities for having the manager’s employees work on your project. The manager also gets an opportunity to talk about specific objectives they have for their employee, which you can support via the task assignments and guidance you provide.

You can perform part of the managers’ work. Giving support and feedback to your team members along with periodic appraisals of their work as the project progresses is very useful to assigning manager. You can make their job easier, especially if you write performance evaluations in the context of the manager’s growth objectives for their employees. Managers who feel confident you do this well will work with you more readily when you seek project team members.

You can ask for a favor. If you need in-demand skills, a good relationship with assigning managers significantly increases the chances you’ll get the in-demand resources you need. Trust-based relationships make it easier for managers to take a risk and assign the most in-demand staff members to your project, even in instances where it is helpful but not necessary.

You can change resources more readily. If you have issues with a resource, the assigning manager is more likely to listen to you and support replacing your team member. At the very least, they are more likely to work with you to help improve your team member’s performance.

The team members you get make or break your projects. Getting to know the managers who assign employees to your projects is the best way to ensure you get the people you need to successfully deliver expected outcomes.

For more about working with team members, check out Chris Croft’s Managing Resources Across Project Teams course.

Project managers often ask for a project deadline. That might be a bad idea. Here are reasons to propose a project deadline rather than request one:

You need to analyze before agreeing to a deadline. Until your project team analyzes the work required to achieve business outcomes, you can’t be sure the deadline provided is feasible. Why ask for a deadline if you can’t acknowledge or refute? Instead, perform analysis on the requested scope and propose a defendable deadline. While that deadline may not be accepted without negotiation, you can talk knowledgeably about the specific risks of bringing in your proposed deadline.

Employ a proactive approach to project management. Setting arbitrary deadlines is not a recommended practice in business! Why do it with projects? Discussing possibilities, approaches and the capabilities and capacity of your team members is more constructive than building a case for why a project deadline may or may not be feasible. These discussions allow project managers to extend the capabilities and control organizational leaders have to manage the business.

Protect how your management team is perceived by team members.  Impractical, arbitrary deadlines proposed by managers can erode the trust-based relationship between management and your team members. Managers who propose deadlines without understanding the complexity of the work can be perceived as out of touch or unappreciative of the work teams perform. Defining objectives and deadlines using a consultative approach between the team and management instills trust and helps ensure buy-in.

Support early discussion of options for the business. Ask the project team for their opinions about business objectives. that way, you won’t have to defend impractical deadlines. Instead, the team can propose scope and time trade-offs and alternative solutions to achieve those business outcomes.

For more about project scheduling and deadlines, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

This post contains affiliate links, and I will be compensated if you click my links and make a purchase.