Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 4)
Posted by ElizabethYesterday I looked at how to overcome the problems of multi-tasking, proximatic competency and inaccurate reporting Today, I have the final two lessons from Ernest Baker’s presentation at last month’s PMI Global Congress North America, ‘Ten troublesome project management ideas and how to combat them!’.
9. Low stakeholder engagement
Project managers working on projects where the stakeholders aren’t engaged are going to have a hard time. You need stakeholders who can put the effort in to support you and your team, and to manage effectively. You can read more about a way to manage your stakeholders using my INFORM method here (link to Wellingtone). However good your management upwards, sideways and downwards for your stakeholders, you will still struggle if they aren’t interested in your project. You have to ask yourself if the project is worth doing, because if they aren’t bothered about it, why should you be? Baker’s approach to dealing with low stakeholder engagement is:
- Set ground rules at the beginning of the project and maintain them
- Create a stakeholder matrix, covering who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed for each part of the project (a RACI chart)
- Understand what ‘complete’ looks like for every task
- Share the ownership of project activities with the team
Baker’s final ‘troublesome idea’ was:
10. Failure to use history
Ever wondered why projects still fail today, when we’ve surely come across all the issues already in other projects? Well, we don’t learn from previous mistakes. Baker pointed out that this is a really common problem, and if you want to know if your organisation suffers in this way you should look for:
- A failure to collect and analyse data
- Mistakes made several (or more) times
- No single repository for knowledge, or shared approach to the content of that repository
- No way of managing continuous process improvement
What you’re doing today is history tomorrow, so if you want to stop making the same mistakes over and over again, you need to start learning from your errors. Baker provided some tips on what to do including:
- Collect data, and make sure it is accessible to others
- Compare plans to the baselined versions so you can see the differences
- Change things that don’t work
- Provide coaching and mentoring for project team members, to make sure the knowledge gets shared about
- Make lessons learned an agenda item for status meetings (PRINCE2 is also big on this)
Baker’s presentation was very comprehensive, and he had an easy style to listen to. If you want the one big takeaway message from the presentation and the following Q&A it was that stakeholder management is the project managers responsibility – and that setting expectations is part of stakeholder management.
Missed the previous articles?
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