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.

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Reports

Standardized project communication is part of effective stakeholder management, and yet at times customized reports may be best. Here are tips for when to invest the additional effort to create customized reports:

A key stakeholder has unique priorities. Stakeholders have unique priorities. Often, customized reports are needed to address those priorities. For example, your finance director may be the only stakeholder interested in your project cash flow from month to month. A project report with specific spending details for your influential and engaged finance director may be appropriate to keep your project moving forward. Don’t volunteer to provide customized reports for every unique stakeholder priority, but be prepared to do so when required to secure stakeholder buy-in.

A risk mitigation strategy calls for customized reports. Awareness can be an effective risk mitigation response. For example, if staff shortages present a project risk, a customized report for the staffing coordinator to address planned versus actual staff hours would be a prudent risk response. Customized reporting can also identify risk triggers that signal a risk coming to fruition and invoke response strategies. While standard reports can usually do this, other reporting may be necessary to surface risk triggers to keep your project on track.

The project gets stuck. Information is usually step 1 for getting a bogged project going again. Customized reports for key stakeholders could be the catalyst for resetting your struggling project. For example, if your stakeholders have conflicting project objectives, customized reports that feature each stakeholder’s area of interest can maintain buy-in and get the project re-focused — or keep it from stalling in the first place.

A stakeholder is stuck.  Influential stakeholders may need to see data presented in a different format or require more detail before they give you their support. After trying to emphasize control capabilities using standard reports, consider alternative reporting to get the support of a critical stakeholder.

You need to reinforce a point. As project managers, we often have foresight to outcomes that busy stakeholders don’t see. Customized reports that demonstrate your concern can be effective in getting the support you need. Say a senior leader gives his staff a generic direction like “make time to work on this project.” As a project manager, you may know that staff is struggling with their everyday operational tasks and will have difficulty accomplishing project work. If your pleas to the senior leader for more detailed direction fall on deaf ears, a report that shows actual allocation of work to the project versus the senior leader’s expectation might demonstrate the need for more detailed prioritization from the leader.

For more about stakeholder management and communications, check out Doug Rose’s Project Management Foundations: Communication course.

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

Photo by Bernd Klutsch on Unsplash

Good change and stakeholder management help make change meetings easy-going approval exercises. Here are steps to avoid contentious change meetings:

1. Ensure technical team members understand change impacts and risks. Technical teams often focus on how to accomplish a change without considering the potential effects on your business. Involve business team leaders so they can confirm the approach for a change before reviewing it with management. Describe any impacts in business language rather than technical jargon.
2. Review change impact and risks with management: Reviewing a change with management before a change meeting facilitates supportive discussion. Your chances of getting a viable change approved increases when you give managers time to process change impacts and plan for how to manage them. This review also allows management to come up with ideas about increased value or reduced risk, which can be incorporated into your change planning. Finally, with time to review changes before the meeting, managers don’t need to ask fundamental questions in front of their peers.
3. Propose a schedule and get preliminary agreement: Sometimes, the hardest part of a simple change is determining the best time to schedule it! The more discussion you have about schedule, the more you will understand the pros and cons of various alternatives. That way, the schedule may be worked out prior to a change meeting or finalized in a non-contentious manner at the change meeting.
4. Ensure all change approvers are on board: Although you may have briefed key stakeholders and technical team members, be sure that all change signatories and their delegates are aware of the analysis that has been done. Answer any questions approvers may have and ensure they are comfortable to proceed. Doing so will avoid prevents undue delays getting your change approved.

Now you can enjoy easy change meetings where confirmation is the agenda. You’ll show that you have things under control and your project is professionally managed.

For more about change management, see Bob McGannon’s LinkedIn Change Management Foundations course.