Who Needs to Know This?

by: stacey - February 10th, 2012   Filed under: Communication Add Comment

How many times has this happened to you:

A key task in the critical path of your project is completely out of control.  It’s not getting done, what is done is all wrong, and everything is late.  You go and talk to the person who is in charge of it, and you hear those fateful words, “I didn’t know X, Y, and Z about this project.  When was that said?”  You immediately go back to your desk and add that person to every project meeting to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  In your next project, you vow to not leave anyone off any meetings, because lack of communication causes problems.

Sound familiar?  It’s common in project management- and it’s also the wrong reaction.

How much homework do you do on who should be in each meeting of your project?  I’m going to suggest something that may be sacrilege to many folks:  overcommunication through meetings can damage your project.

Think about it:

  • By including people in a given meeting who didn’t need to be there, you are wasting company resources and robbing other projects of available resources.
  • By including people in a meeting who doesn’t need to be there, you reduce how engaged that they are in your project.  A few meetings like this, and you will completely loose their attention- which means that they’ll miss details later that you can’t afford them to miss.
  • Worse, if they perceive your meetings to waste their time, they will stop coming.
  • Even worse than that, their manager might pull *all his resources* out of your meetings rather than waste their time.
  • People sitting in the meetings not paying attention will naturally set a bad example to others.  If others in the room are not engaged, your other team members will also become less engaged.

What can you do to avoid these problems?  Simple:  do your homework before you hold a meeting.  If certain people do not need to be there, be sure to leave them out.  If they missed something that they need to hear, DO NOT tell them through sending out a project status report to the whole team- take the time to send them a note directly.  Trust me, your status report suffers from the same attention problem as your meetings.  Sending a direct note will better draw the team member’s attention.

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Too Much Spin Can Make You Dizzy…

by: stacey - January 9th, 2012   Filed under: Communication Add Comment

For better or worse, the business place nowadays is often rife with politics. Really, it always has been. With the many ways of communication nowadays though, the press, bloggers, unhappy customers building websites, activist groups, class action lawsuits, and all the trappings that go with making mistakes in modern business though, it’s no wonder we sometimes get lost in the spin.

The consequences of mistakes in business have grown such that most business people I know have trouble seperating the facts in a decision from the spin that will be put on the results later on. They frame every possible decision in terms of how it may look to the press, the stockholders, the SEC, the customers, the VP down the hall, the list goes on and on. When we do this, we can’t think clearly about the issue itself. It’s even worse when you are in a meeting. Every time someone puts a possible outcome on the table, there’s a whole room full of people spinning it in every direction to find how it could come out badly, squashing the idea. Keep doing this, and you will often find that you have no good solution whatsoever. Even if you don’t, the only decision you will arrive at is the one no one can say anything bad about, which usually means no risk. No risk in business equals no innovation.

What happens is that people confuse possible fallout with substance. Put your spin away. Try leading your meeting off with something like this: “First, let’s decide what to do. We can decide how to sell it afterwards. If we don’t, we’ll spend all day selling and never have a product to sell.”

Set the stage right. First, you all need to decide what to do based on the facts and non-political risks involved. After you have done this, you can think about how to present your decision and do any political damage control. You cannot make the right decisions, the tough decisions in life, if you worry about how you’re going to sell them first. Make your decision, then sell it. This is what leadership is all about.

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If You Want Happy Customers, Give Them Less Information

by: stacey - December 16th, 2011   Filed under: Communication, Customer Relations, Project Management Add Comment

Guy Kawasaki wrote a great post a while back about customer happiness.  I’ve seen this at work before.  My parents, for example, have been thinking about buying a big screen television for years.  The problem is, nowadays, there’s HDTV, LCDs, DLP, plasma, projection, etc.  The choices are too many, the television makers are not clear on what it all means, the salesmen keep sharing more and more technical details, and so in frustration and confusion they simply do not buy.  If someone simply made the decision about what the television looked like, what size they want, and ‘hey, look how nice this picture is’, they would’ve made the decision by now- but the sales folk don’t do things that way, and so they lose out on the sale.

So it goes in IT and project management as well.  Too many times, we want the business to understand that we’re thinking ahead for them, that we’re using the right technologies, making good decisions, and sometimes the business simply does not care.  It’s not that they don’t want us to make good decisions, its that that’s our job, and they don’t need to hear about it.  They need to know when we’ll make their jobs easier.  The key is understanding when you should simplify things for the client, and when you should not.  Here’s a few example cases.

When the Sponsor/client cares about the end result:

Sometimes, people just want their problem solved.  They don’t care that you’re using web services to solve their problem.  They don’t care about the database.  They don’t care about anything except solving the specific business problem that they’ve identified.  What you should report to them is when you’ll be done, when the documentation and training will be available, and when you think they’ll be able to put the solution to use.  If this is what your client wants, then anything else other than updates to these three pieces of information likely just irritates them.  The result is everything to them.  If you talk about all the details you are wasting their time, and to them you are focusing on the process rather than getting them their result.  Stick to the basics.

When you are late on a project:

See the item before.  No matter how much the client may care about the process and the details when you’re on track, once you’re late, then they can get impatient.  Stick to the details of what you’re doing to get things back on track.  Don’t worry about the rest until you’ve solved that problem.

When your problems are not the client’s problems

The client’s problems consist of the fact that they don’t have their solution yet, what to do until it arrives, all the communication and change management around the solution implementation, training their staff, listening to their staff complain about things changing, learning how to use the new solution, providing training, and dozens of other things not related to your project/product.  The difficulties related to RPMs not compiling correctly on the linux installation are of no interest to them- that’s your problem, and that’s why you’re in charge of the project, not them.  In fact, there’s some chance that they don’t even care if you’re using linux, windows, unix, or bands of mongoose that quickly rewrite their screen every time they click on something new.  They just want their solution, and if you can tell them how you’ll make their other problems easier, that’s an added bonus.

Other times, you should share as much information as possible with the client.  Some examples are:

The solution will be delivered in phases

The client isn’t getting everything they want up front.  This complicates their lives.  Share as much as possible about what they can expect and when.

The client will be maintaining the solution after implementation

If the client has to maintain whatever it is you’re delivering, then you can’t give them enough information.  They will want and should have as much say as possible in as many decisions as possible.

All in all, understanding the right amount of information to share with the customer goes a long way towards their happiness.  Share too much, and you’re wasting their time and your own.  Keep your project reports tuned to the audience’s needs.

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