How stable is your stakeholder base?
Posted by Elizabeth
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 »
Ask the Experts: Rick Maurer
Posted by Elizabeth
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
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 »
Executive Management’s Role in Stakeholder Satisfaction
Posted by Brad Egeland
In general, the purpose of projects is to satisfy stakeholders. Now consider how much you have to magnfiy that for the manager or executive responsible for overseeing the implementation of many projects. Project managers often cite timely decisions, sufficient staffing, participation in customer status meetings, and visibility to the team as signs of management support. Yet, maintaining active involvement and oversight for a range of independent projects seems nearly impossible. A manager with a schedule full of customer and project meetings can feel more like a bottleneck than a productivity multiplier.
The only way to effectively support multiple projects and devote your time to the projects that need it the most is to monitor and control your portfolio using the project control systems. Managers of multiple projects have no choice; they must use SOW, regular status reports, issue logs, and the other control tools to sufficiently understand their project portfolios. It goes without saying that the company’s overall project management practice must have these activities already built in to their project management methodology and in full use in order for the managers to realize success in using these control tools.
Project managers say that their best supervisors understand the language of project management. This language allows them to speak precisely about problems and progress. Decisions are made based on facts and rational analysis. When the organization adopts consistent formats for the project management tools, the communication between projects and management becomes even clearer. And we all understand that the effective and efficient flow of communication can make or break the success of the engagements being managed.
Making Good Project Decisions
Posted by Brad Egeland
Decision-making is an ongoing task on every project engagement. Key decisions have to be made throughout by everyone including the project manager, the project team members, the customer, executive management, and usually other stakeholders. They may be as simple as when to hold a meeting or as difficult as making a go- no-go decision on a phase of the project or the entire project.
What we often lack when making some key decisions is the right information at the right time. We all know that making what seems to be the right decision based on information that ends up being inaccurate or out of date can be fatal to the project.
What if you could only make decisions on when to cross the street based on a snapshot taken five minutes ago? Would this help? Would you have any confidence in whether or not you should cross the street? After all, it could be a life or death decision.
Well, that’s often how organizations are continually making business and technology decisions. Many decisions we make on projects are based on what we knew two days ago or two weeks ago or what someone told us last Thursday. Ideally, information would be flowing to all key personnel constantly and we would be making key business, project, and technology decisions based on what we just learned – not what we knew last week. What if you could make sense of what you learn as fast as you learn it and put that into play?
There is no magic wand to wave to make this all happen. However, since the project manager is the key focal point for all communication on the project, there are some things – or at least some actions – that can be put into place that will help ensure that the right information is getting to the right people as quickly as possible. And that, in turn, should help ensure that the project decisions that are made are based on the most relevant and accurate information possible.
These are:
Develop and distribute a communication plan
The key to getting all of this communication off on the right foot is to publish a communication plan for the project at the outset. Produce this document shortly after kickoff and let it document and set the tone for all communication that will flow on the project. This document will correctly set expectations of how, when, where and through who communication will happen. For more information on the project communication plan, please read an earlier article of mine on the topic here. You can also download a copy of one of my actual project communication plans to use as a template. Go to www.bradegeland.com and navigate to the Templates & Downloads page to access the sample plan.
Improving Requirements Quality with Use Cases
Posted by Brad EgelandPeople sometimes like to dive right in to requirements definition by simply starting to write them on a blank sheet of paper – or blank Word doc for those of us who have gone completely green. Starting the requirements definition process this way can be very intimidating at best and full of oversights, omissions, and conflicts at worst. Even if you define and document scope in detail as I’ve discussed in the past, it’s still a big leap from a scope document to detailed requirements. Customers often have a hard time with requirements and you certainly can’t write all the requirements for them. You can help … but be sure to bill for it.
Sample ATM system usage use case diagram
Use cases are a simple, cost-effective way to build a consensus among stakeholders and to discover missing requirements. They tend to address two large classes of requirements errors – omitted requirements and conflicting requirements. While drilling down further into requirements, the customer – usually with your help – can utilize use cases to get detailed requirements across all life-cycle phases to support the requirements definition process.
Why develop use cases?
Use cases are relatively easy to generate. The customer must access their stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) to get well-thought out use cases that can be used to derive detailed and meaningful requirements for the engagement. Below are some of the reasons and pluses for generating these use cases: Read more »
