They want their projects to be on time and they want you to do whatever it takes to achieve that and don’t come to them with problems or reasons why it can’t be done. Many project managers will have experienced this challenging stance from senior stakeholders.
Such an attitude can perhaps to a large extent be justifiable. Whilst your project may be 100% of your working world, it might be 10% of theirs or even less. They don’t have the bandwidth to deal with your problems. They’re not supposed to have the bandwidth. The PM is there to solve most of the problems and keep the project on the rails and on target.
In my own personal experience, I sense that perhaps such attitudes are sometimes though, also borne out of stakeholders’ own unsatisfactory past project experiences. Too often their PMs have come to them with problems and wanted more money or more time or more resources or perhaps all three. Perhaps with seemingly flimsy justifications and vacuous or bumbling answers to searching and even reasonable questions and challenges. So stakeholders’ and sponsors’ past frustrations lead to just not wanting to hear it. Talk to the hand.
Many of you will already appreciate the dangerous threat this dynamic represents to a project. There will often be reasonable justification and need for more of something in order to deliver. It’s the nature of projects. A project plan, a roadmap, a timeline, a budget… is only a forecast. And if the PM is forced to be in fear of proposing refinement of said forecast, then stakeholders will likely only find out when it’s too late. Too late to take mitigating actions. Too late to even evaluate the options and stay on track or close to it. Possibly too late to avoid a disastrous project outcome.
It’s doubtless project management 101, but clearly there are some fundamentals a PM can get right to mitigate the risk of this dynamic surfacing. To protect and project your credibility and inspire confidence. Stakeholders want to feel confident. To be confident. I’ll throw out the obvious ones and apologise for patronising many of you:
- Expectation setting. Make sure they understand and accept that the further away from a launch you all are, the greater the degree of uncertainty, the greater the number and size of the unknowns. Put some metrics to it if you can. Your degree of certainty about a feasible successful go live date clearly should increase the closer you get to your target date.
- Avoid panic syndrome. Don’t go to your stakeholders with every little threat before you’ve done what you can within your own legitimate sphere of influence to mitigate or resolve it without their contribution. You’ll otherwise risk giving the impression you and the project are out of control, not a sensation a stakeholder appreciates.
- Solutions, not problems. When your judgement tells you that you really need to engage senior stakeholders, always go with options and always go with a recommendation. Which option is best and why? Test them out with others in your team. Get the right inputs. Make your proposal solid.
- Anticipate. Don’t be blindsided by questions you weren’t expecting and give vacuous or bumbling responses. Think about the questions that might come up and have your answers prepared.
- Transparency. You will sometimes be asked questions you didn’t anticipate and don’t have an answer for immediately. Shock horror. Don’t give vacuous or bumbling responses. It’s OK to not know everything immediately. Be open. Be honest. If you don’t know, tell them what you’ll do to get the answers.
As I alluded to, many of you will already live and breathe this, whilst some may find the reminder helpful. But sometimes, no matter how seasoned you are, you might not always have the right answers when stakeholders expect them. This is probably an appropriate juncture to confess this is something of an advertorial, because I have built a project planning, tracking and reporting solution that I believe is a great asset for stakeholder management and PM credibility, and helps you ensure you do have a lot of those answers with very little ongoing effort. And inspire confidence and foster collaboration from your stakeholders.
Anyway, back to those questions you might encounter. You show your dashboard you’ve painstakingly pulled together, and talk about your RAG status and percentage complete and share your plans to get from amber back to green again. And they ask you how you’re tracking. They want to see the status and percentage complete and RAG progression for the last couple of months, because it’s been fluctuating a fair bit. Or you present your RAID log statistics of how many open and closed etc, and they ask how you’re tracking. Snapshots are great, critical even, in assessing the current health of your project. But what stakeholders want is to trust your projections for the future trajectory of the project health. They want to feel confident their project is in safe hands. If you can show the progression, show what happened last time you weren’t green, demonstrate that you’re tracking the delta and the qualitative elements and assessments all the time as well, you’ll likely increase your chances of instilling that confidence and justifying it. Because it means you are a safe pair of hands.
The trouble is, even generating quality snapshot data is time-consuming. Storing and tracking history and deltas with tables and charts yet more burdensome. Too often I’ve been forced to use labour-intensive manual powerpoint presentations to align all projects and project managers and give stakeholders a uniform experience. It can be time-consuming. A distraction from effectively managing your resources, budget, schedule and the delivery.
It’s why I created Proper Plan. I’ve been using an evolving version of it for many years, but have now created a functionally rich and heavily automated version with lots of guidance and troubleshooting notes and even quite a few real-time validations where you do something you shouldn’t. I’ve done that to render it shareable and saleable, and usable with only an average grasp of MS Excel.
Proper Plan not only has a highly sophisticated project planning and resource utilisation management capability, it automatically provides a snapshot dashboard with insightful, meaningful data and bar chart visuals, and the option to add your own qualitative commentary. Furthermore, when you run a macro that takes a couple of seconds, it banks your snapshot every time and tables and charts them for you for the duration of the project. Another macro allows you to track baselines in a similar fashion.
My closing thoughts are that projects are often among the most difficult challenges a business faces. The relationships between sponsors, stakeholders, the PM and the wider team are critical to effectively meeting those challenges. If PMs have the tools to not only provide robust planning and insightful reporting and tracking, but to also free their time to more effectively manage all aspects of actual delivery, then those relationships are far more likely to be the positive and collaborative ones everyone needs.
