How stable is your stakeholder base?

What would happen if someone new came on board tomorrow?  Not necessarily a project team member, but a new executive?

It’s not that unusual.  Stakeholders at executive level change frequently.  From time to time the board will move responsibilities for certain initiatives around between themselves.  You might find that your project is now the responsibility of the marketing director instead of the sales director.  Or that something previously sponsored by finance is now sitting with the VP of Product Development.

Executive stakeholders can also change due to redundancy or through the post holder finding a new career opportunity.  On a long project, you should expect a certain degree of change.  And the more senior the stakeholder, the less notice you will get about the change. Read more »

The MOST Model

A while back, I looked at the SIO model. This month, I have another acronym to share: MOST.  MOST is a bit like SIO, in that it is a way of creating granular levels within an organisation so that you focus on the right type of information for the right type of task.  You can use it within a project to ensure that everything is aligned, and it is also useful at Portfolio or corporate level.

MOST stands for:

• Mission
• Objectives
• Strategies
• Tactics.

As you can imagine, this can apply to pretty much anything and it lends itself very well to setting project structure.
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Ask the Experts: Rick Maurer

Seventy percent of all major changes in organizations fail – and that number hasn’t changed since researchers started examining success and failure rates some fifteen years ago. I spoke to Rick Maurer, a change management expert, speaker, and author of the new book Beyond the Wall of Resistance, Revised 2nd Edition: Why 70% of All Changes Still Fail–and What You Can Do About It, to find out more about why this happens with change projects.

Rick, why are people so resistant to change?

People resist in response to something. For example, they are given a project to do that doesn’t make sense to them, or they are afraid of the implication a project might have on them personally (I could lose my job or my position, etc.), or they don’t have trust and confidence in the people leading the project. Any of those reactions can cause resistance.

The good news is that people also support change in response to something. They understand what the project is all about. They like what they hear about it. And they trust the people leading the project to do their work well, to treat people fairly, and to follow through on commitments.

It’s a dance, and the project manager’s job is to try to create conditions that help members (themselves included) lean toward support rather than resistance. Read more »

Why is it So Hard to Plan Well Up Front? – Part 1

Why is it that time and time again projects end up with bad requirements?  Why do the same project experiences and nightmares seem to happen over and over again?

Imagine this scenario – and it may hit home with you so it might not take too much imagination.  You are an intelligent and confident leader.  Let’s say you’re in charge of the project and you have a leadership role in seeing that requirements get documented well.  You’ve been educated in the ways of project management and understand the importance of good requirements definition.  You started your last project strictly adhering to a textbook method of project planning and requirements definition, only to find that the ideas weren’t catching on with your team.

Before you could figure out why it wasn’t working with the team, your supervisor requests a progress update (since this is a very visible project).  It seems like a career-killer to tell him that you’re still trying to figure out what to do, so realize that you must get something going and you decide you’re too busy to implement a new process designed to help you do things the right way.

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Onboarding with Success

When you’re asked to jump on a new project how do you go about doing that to ensure your best chance for success? That may often depend on why you’re being asked to take over the project … and it can be for any one of the following reasons:

• Previous project manager failed to manage the team and project effectively
• Previous project manager lost the customer’s confidence
• Previous project manager lacked the expertise to lead the project based on new direction
• An emergency necessitated an early departure for the project manager
• Co-management became a necessity due to changes on the project Read more »