Building Better Buy-In

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Not everyone believes in your project. But sheer force of personality doesn’t bring about buy-in; it doesn’t dissolve legitimate doubts or deliver desired results. Take time before the project starts to build a shared understanding of where you're going, why you're going there, and how success will be measured when you get there.

I recently faced a situation with one of my clients where I was asked to lead the implementation of a new vendor tool. The tool was intended to help sales representatives to close complex deals — essentially a way to work with the customer to assess the need at the outset, and then measure again after the work was complete to show improvement. The tool had been around in an informal capacity for some time, but now the investment was being made in deploying it more fully across the organization.

The decision to use the tool had been made by the product management teams who felt that it would support their offering, but the sales teams, who had to convince customers to buy in to the use of the tool and accept the impact (and cost) on their organization, had not been part of the decision making and were convinced that the tool would become a barrier.

As project leaders, how do we deal with this situation?

It’s about the project

I know of some PMs who would be able to successfully deliver this project based on nothing more …

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