The New York Times – Sunday, August 22, 2010. The Summer That Ended All Summers by Josh Weil. is an amazing piece of writing with a life expanding message: No matter what happens and no matter where we are or whose company we keep, packages of insight and beauty are in front of us and no where else.

Heaven, Earth and the Devil are in the Details

You are the project sponsor. However,  having the title does not necessarily mean you are the most informed member of the team. In fact your role may distance you from the details. If this is the case you may find yourself going “high level” when pressed to discuss project status with your stakeholders. Now what??

Have you been experiencing any of these symptoms?:

• Feeling uneasy about project progress and don’t know what to do about it
• Don’t fully understand project activities, deliverables and time lines
• Don’t know who is leading what
• Can’t recite the project milestones
• Feel like the Far Side dog when listening to your project leader, “blah, blah, blah, blah…”
• Don’t understand the project acronyms

I’ll stop here….Houston, we have a problem!

The Solution: Do whatever it takes to get smart about your project.

Rule #4: Tell your ego to pipe down, do your homework and Get Smart.

1. Tell your project leader that you would like an in-depth project review led by him/her with each of the functional and content leads presenting status on their area of expertise. Ask them to summarize with good graphics, diagrams and data. Explain that you will be asking a lot of questions so that you, and they, will be able to explain the project to anyone who asks going forward.

2. Have someone assigned to write down your questions and answers and use this to start your FAQs….that would be “Frequently Asked Questions”.

3. In the privacy of your home or office, read the FAQs and remember the answers. Jot down clarifying questions and get them answered within 48 hours.

4. Use your FAQs to drive your next presentation to senior staff or key stakeholders.

If you don’t know what’s going on, you can be sure that no-one else does.

If you do this, your team will see you as involved and committed to understanding the project details. Your executive peers will hear about it and know you are on top of it – because you are.

Barriers to IT Strategic Relevance

Henry Peyret, in his 2007 Forrester article, Assess Your Enterprise Agility well describes the CIO dilemma:

• IT objectives still include only cost reduction and quality
• IT objectives rarely reflect enterprise agility objectives
• Many firms still measure IT on its contribution to cost reductions

While there are a number of current IT trends that, in theory, should improve enterprise agility — such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), on-demand services, pervasive technologies, outsourcing, Dynamic Business Applications, agile development, and off-shoring, these technologies require cross-department investment in enterprises where each business unit manages budgets separately.

A reliance on shared services inhibits change flexibility. Typical shared services like IT, HR, and procurement are often seen as inhibitors to change. While their main objective is to decrease global costs, they often do not deliver the right level of adaptability to the different business units that are facing change. These units complain that shared services provide either the same “lowest common denominator” service at the lowest price for every business unit or a higher level of service but at a higher service/price ratio that is too expensive for the “poorest” units.

Think about this as you design and scope your ERP, outsourcing or shared service initiatives.

If IT wants to be strategically relevant, it must provide business value beyond cost reduction. As you plan your initiative, are you including business functionality, process redesign, and change management that will enable strategic business value?

Change Management Snowflakes

I have spent the last 22 years knee deep in large scale change initiatives. I have led, coached or rescued over 30 projects for Fortune 500 companies and 5 for non profits. So far, I have yet to see two that are alike. Therefore:

Barbara’s Rule #5: Change Management is Like Snowflakes

You will use standards and best practice methods and tools of course. However, your approach and the details of what you do and how you do it must be tailored or it won’t work. Your Change Management Approach must be customized to your company culture, to your business calendar, to your project cadence (more on cadence later). It must fit your team’s needs and abilities, your stakeholders’ appetites for information and your leadership style. You manage the project by phases, gates, milestones and metrics. You manage the adoption of new behavior by understanding the best and worst of human nature, paying close attention to nuance and knowing when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, and when to walk away. Change Management is alchemy: one part science and two parts artistry. Done well, it turns today’s project elements into tomorrow’s business gold.

Word Magician

My client just sent me a note thanking me for my help in rewriting a document for our project. She said, “Thank you for updating this. It is very good. You are a real word magician.”

Is this a good thing? Is this an added value for project management? I think the answer is yes…and yes. Using language clearly is very, very helpful on projects when you need to be sure you are saying exactly what you mean so that people in multiple locations can understand you. It is critical on global projects where English is not everyone’s native language. Words may or may not be your strong suit but either way, it is worth it to take some extra time to re-read your emails and your project documentation and make corrections. It is worth it to spend a moment to try to say what you mean. This should not require more than an extra few moments of focused attention. It is not about using descriptive language and big words. What is needed is almost always in the direction of simplifying and organizing your thoughts. Once you are very clear about what you do and do not mean, writing them down clearly is pretty easy and quick. So here is the magic ingredient for clear writing:

Think first, then write, then check what you wrote!

Now I am going to re-read and edit this post!

Role Forward

Do you think writing a detailed description of project roles is a boring waste of time? OK, maybe you are not that extreme. Do you think it is a good idea but not a top priority say, ahead of creating the project work plan? You are wrong on both counts. If you don’t do this up front and use it every time you introduce new team members, and if you don’t make sure that everyone is actually working according to their roles, you are sowing chaos into the fabric of your project. Does this mean that everyone has to ONLY do what is in their role? Of course not. There is always some overlap and always a need for people to pitch in and help on activities beyond their role. But if you don’t get clarity about each person’s primary responsibility, you are asking for trouble. So DO IT! Here is a starter template and exampe you can use to make the job easier:

Shannon Solutions Launches a New Website

Shannon Solutions is pleased to announce the launch of this website on March 19, 2010.  The  new ShannonSolutions.com site features a clean, modern look and streamlined navigation.

The new format provides exceptional flexibility and enables me to use videos and podcasts as well as down-loadable content for registered users. I have also included a blog and with comments providing a forum for sharing best practices and war stories front.

This is my new global communication tool aimed at establishing a closer relationship with you.

I look forward to your feedback and to using this site to help you manage your projects and transform your business.

~Barbara Shannon

Who’s On First?

While you are running the bases of project management, your stakeholders are wondering “When are we going to see the benefits of this project?”

Deployment Planning is the process of figuring out which business units will receive which new system functionality, business processes and tools and when they will receive them.

Why invest in deployment planning?
To ensure that you optimize costs and benefits over time.

Some changes to roles, processes, technology must take place right away – NOW!
Some are better planned as your short term follow-on activities – Next
Some may occur in a second phase of the project or initiative – Later

Here’s a little Deployment Planning Algorithm for really geeky project managers:

Optimized Deployment = (Now+Next+Later)/Time

This probably seems really obvious and simple. It is if your project is small. It gets exponentially more complicated with scale. Given the multitude of dependencies you are balancing such as business requirements, customer requirements, budgets, process hand-offs, training development and executive schedules, a step-by-step approach to your Now-Next-Later Deployment Plan is a critical success factor for most large projects.

Herding the Executive Cats

How do you solve a problem called Executive Alignment?
They said they were on board. So why don’t they show up? And most importantly, why are their direct reports fighting you on the assignment of needed resources ? You’ve written a clear project strategy with clear objectives and a business case that demonstrates your project’s value proposition. So, why does everyone still seem so confused?

What’s Going On?

Imagine that each of your stakeholders is a magnet capable of uniting or splintering their extended network for or against your project’s objectives. The power of the magnets may differ, some are positively charged and some are negative but the ability to control their combined effect on your project is the single greatest lever in your change management toolkit. Are your stakeholders pulling towards a common objective or is your company’s management team its own worst enemy? Once the negative energy starts it will spread invisibly and swiftly and it will create havoc in the white spaces of your project.

Are your stakeholders impotent or worse?

• The VP who practices public support but behind the scenes bets against your success
• The Director who believes in the project but can’t commit any of her people to its implementation
• Your peer in a lateral department who led a similar project last year, knows you are underfunded but hasn’t told you he can help you find more money because he doesn’t want to insult your intelligence.

With these kinds of friends, who needs enemies?

What’s a Project Leader to do?

Executive Alignment uses project management, soft skills, hard data, simple logic, coaching and business acumen to help you get the support you need to succeed.

Sound easy? You’re right. It’s not. It’s really hard. That’s why most projects come in late and over budget, with all kinds of bugs and failures.

The Good News is if you take it step by step, it may not be easy but it is doable.