Make Change Meetings Easy
Good change and stakeholder management help make change meetings easy-going approval exercises. Here are steps to avoid contentious change meetings:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Working with Home-based Team Members
With home-based team members, it’s helpful to understand some of their habits. Here are a few that help you with them effectively:
Identify each team member’s preferred work hours: Home-based team members face challenges like childcare and home schooling. Find out when they’re the most productive. Don’t make assumptions. A colleague of mine used to assume home-based employees preferred contact during regular business hours. Only after a conversation did he learn that his employee tried to work a late shift so he could home-school his children in the morning.
Uncover what inspires ideas for your team members: We all have habits to recharge or generate new ideas. Some do this alone, while others prefer discussions. You can support team members when you know their preferences. Because you can’t see this behavior with remote employees, you have to ask. This knowledge guides you to intervene and ask questions, invite them to discuss situations, and arrange task deadlines so they have time to generate new ideas or solutions.
Do they prefer working solo or collaboratively?: This basic characteristic is often overlooked, even though it’s critical for maximizing someone’s productivity. With many people now working from home, don’t assume they are adjusting to working solo. Be proactive to understand their preference and support their need to work solo or collaboratively.
Share your own habits: If your employees know your patterns, they can work with you more effectively. They will understand how and when you are most likely to respond. Let your virtual team members know which tools you use and how frequently. Do you check email once a day and voicemail five times a day, or is it the other way around? Share the working hours during which you are likely to respond for non-emergencies.
Understanding habits can help set expectations, create better working relationships, and improve team collaboration and communication.
For more about working with your team members, check out my Project Management Foundations course.
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Including Lessons Learned in a Closeout Report
Capturing lessons learned thoughtfully in a closeout report is important and often overlooked. Here are lessons learned to include in your closeout report:
Project successes and issues: Highlight what went well and any issues experienced to inform future project managers. Keep to the facts. Don’t share personal opinions. Avoid names. The individuals involved won’t necessarily be available for future projects. Avoiding names also reduces the concern of publicly appraising a team member.
Plan recommendations and risk records: Help the next project manager be proactive. Recommend planning approaches and share risk records that would have helped your project. Be specific to ensure that people not involved in your project fully understand the information. Document any organizational priorities or management preferences that impacted your project, as they will likely affect future projects. Don’t mention names. Simply share the priorities expressed by different areas of the business.
Early warning signs: Identify conditions that foreshadowed issues that occurred on your project. These signals are often overlooked. When tied to recommended risk records, knowing early warning signs can save considerable money and time on future projects. Talk about the characteristics of early deliverables and/or circumstances that affected your schedule or budget. If debates occurred between team managers, document those including their positions and rationales.
Other items you learned: Document what you wished you knew before you started the project. The future project manager that references this may be YOU, and you’ll be glad for a reminder of what to do or avoid on your new project!
For more about this, check out my course Project Management Foundations course.
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It’s Not Just Agile versus Waterfall
Designing your approach to project delivery is a strategic exercise, as there are several options. Here are questions to consider when choosing your approach:
How detailed will your requirements be? If your customer knows what they want and significant requirement changes are unlikely, traditional waterfall methods are appropriate. But pick only the waterfall tools you need. Limit project documentation to what will address risk. For example, you don’t need a procurement plan if you will purchase from a trusted supplier you have worked with before. Determine the tools you need based on the skill and experience you, your team, and key stakeholders have with the type of product you are delivering
What product are you producing? Agile, design/build or waterfall methodologies may or may not be suitable based on your project output. Building a house – think waterfall. A stand-alone web platform – think agile. But you could build either of those with a design/build approach if some requirements are well defined while others need to evolve. Consider how much flexibility you have in building your project’s products. Then choose the methodology that gives you the best chance of fulfilling scope and delivering on time.
What staff do you have available? Agile can be a fantastic way to deliver a product – but only if you have experienced staff. Transitioning to agile is not trivial, so having staff members experienced in agile is important. If you are adopting agile, you can go hybrid…building parts of your product with agile and others in more of a waterfall approach. Selecting a project methodology based on your current capabilities and what you are aspiring to learn is a productive approach.
What does your customer expect? The project successes and failures your customers had in the past will form their judgment around project methodologies. They will have expectations for what they see or don’t see as you manage the project. If nothing else, embrace being predictable. A customer who understands what you are doing and whose expectations are being met – even in the face of some diversity – will usually stick with you. You might be running a perfect project but if what you’re doing seems unpredictable to your customer, your position is tenuous.
Remember, it isn’t just agile or waterfall. Agile, design/build, a hybrid approach or waterfall with extensive or limited tools are all options as you decide on a methodology to deliver your project outcomes.
For more on project management methodologies, check out my Project Management Foundations course on Linkedin Learning.
Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash
When the Sponsor and Customer are Two Different People
When your sponsor and project customer are two different people, you face some unique challenges. Here are tips for handling this situation:
Address differing needs. Understand the motivations and concerns of your sponsor and customer. Customize your reports and briefings to fit those needs. If they aren’t in alignment, your status updates are the best hope for creating cohesion on the project. Although it isn’t feasible to customize communication for every stakeholder, your sponsor and customer are vital and require appropriate attention.
Align priorities. Delivering scope, within budget and on time is the goal. However, issues may dictate prioritizing these critical constraints. Facilitate a discussion your sponsor and customer to align priorities. Imagine the challenge if your sponsor wants to cut scope to stay within budget, while your customer wants to retain scope and spend more. If they can’t agree, defer to your sponsor (and focus on the next two tips to keep things moving!)
Create a review committee. Your customer and sponsor may have different views of project success. Major deliverables and decisions require meaningful discussion and decision-making. Creating a committee to review deliverables and make significant decisions helps ensure organizational buy-in as your project proceeds.
Verify the approval process. Make sure your sponsor and customer are on the same page about who will make decisions and how that process will work. Determine this process in advance . The last thing you want is schedule delays because the sponsor and customer are arguing and engaging in an escalation process.
Having separate sponsor and customer perspectives and passion for your project brings many benefits – you generally produce a better product! Helping these vital stakeholder work in harmony is an important part of your role as a project manager.
To learn more, watch my course (#10 on LinkedIn’s Top 20 most popular courses for 2020). LinkedIn has made it free for September 2020.
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The Importance of Testing Plans
Testing is often an underdeveloped part of project plans. Here are circumstances that make solid testing plans critical:
Uncharted territory. If your project is delivering a product new to your company, risk increases. To address this risk, testing should include reviews throughout the project life-cycle.
Interface complexity. As interface volume and complexity increases, so does your need for rigorous testing. In your testing plan, consider impacts to people, processes, and technology from all interfaces.
Vendor touchpoints. Integrating vendor products means more interfaces with increased complexity. Expand your normal testing rigor when vendor products are involved. Increase your testing regime with vendor products. Test all assumptions. Create a data dictionary and confirm compliance with its contents.
For more on testing, watch this LinkedIn Learning testing course.
What Do I Do When My Sponsor is Also My Customer?
An engaged sponsor who doubles as your primary customer has pros and cons. Here are a few tips for handling this situation:
Prioritize the triple constraints. A combined sponsor/customer makes it easier to prioritize time, cost and scope. While you should strive to meet all three constraints, your job will be easier when you understand your sponsor/customer’s views on compromising among those constraints. For example, when issues surface, you can respond quickly and in line with your sponsors wishes. When your sponsor and customer are the same person you get no significant arguments about these priorities!
Seek different perspectives. Find a management resource that can counter an overly headstrong sponsor/customer can be useful. The idea sharing that occurs when your sponsor and customer are different people won’t happen when it’s only one person holding those roles. Find a trusted resource who can present different perspectives to generate idea sharing that leads to better outcomes.
Use an inclusive review process. The sponsor/customer might feel so confident in their perspectives that they overlook the need for reviews and validation activities. Work with your sponsor to schedule team reviews and invite other interested parties to ensure the project concepts and outcomes are valid and can be easily adopted by your organization.
Leverage the energy. Work with your sponsor to share their energy and dedication to the project with project stakeholders. A combined sponsor/customer has numerous reasons for the project to succeed. They often have clear ideas as well. Sharing that energy will generate enthusiasm and clarity for the project which can support the change management aspects of your project.
For more on project roles, watch this LinkedIn Learning course.
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Identifying the right people to provide requirements
Having the right resources to identify requirements gets your project off to a great start. Here are 4 steps that can help:
- Identity the right stakeholder groups. Identify the various stakeholder groups that will be impacted by the new product or solution. Which ones are right? The ones that will be impacted by the new solution or product. These can include internal departments and external entities such as vendors, customers and consumers. Don’t forget groups such as IT support, Legal, Procurement, Finance, Safety, Security, and Compliance.
- Acquire the right domain expertise. Ensure all representatives have appropriate domain knowledge for the stakeholder group they represent. If not, push back to get ones who do. Ideally, getting at least two representatives from each domain helps you obtain broader perspectives.
- Confirm resource availability. The best resources are rarely idle. Negotiate with the appropriate manager to obtain the right resources by explaining the value of requirements identification. Design the requirements identification process to maximize the value obtained from these critical resources in the least about of time.
- Attitude matters. The right attitude is essential. Work with your designated representatives to get them excited about participating in the requirements process. Emphasize how they can influence business outcomes for the area they represent.
With the right people are engaged in the requirements identification process, you can greatly increase your chances of achieving the desired business outcomes.
For more info on requirements, check out this LinkedIn Learning course
Managing a project during a pandemic
Managing projects is rarely easy. Managing during a pandemic is another matter! Here are four actions that can help:
Soft skills first! It’s time to highlight your soft skills. Touch base with each team member to determine their ability to perform. Based on their circumstances, you may need to adjust their availability upward or downward if they’re working from home. Follow up frequently, understand their changing needs, and adjust project plans as required.
Accommodate unpredictability. We’re seeing change like we’ve never experienced before. Mentally prepare for frequently-changing demands and adjust plans to support those changes. Align your risk management plan accordingly. Now is not the time to over-commit. Review your project schedule to determine the actual output capability of your team and adjust as required.
Leverage technology. Have your video conference expert show others the features your tool has to offer. The more comfortable EACH team member is with video capabilities, the more productive and relaxed they will become.
Remember self-care. Don’t forget about yourself. Proactively communicate the project changes you believe are necessary to ensure you have the tools, resources, and emotional support you need. The more balanced you are – the better equipped you will be to help each team member as required.
During this unpredictable time, you need to balance caring for the project mission, your team, and yourself!
#projectpointers #projectmanagement
For more, check out the LinkedIn Learning Become a Project Manager learning path
INTERESTING LINKS
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O'Reilly 50% Ebook Deal of the Day
Microsoft Project blog
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