The Money Files

Ann Pilkington, in her book Communicating Projects, has a short section about managing project communications on a budget. I’ve never worked on a project that has had a large budget for project communications, although I know that many public works and civil engineering projects have money set aside for this. Somehow engaging with the public seems to warrant more cash than engaging with your colleagues, even if the actual user group is the same size or smaller.

Pilkington starts off by advising that you should spend your communication budget wisely by targeting the audience and what they want to know. A scatter-gun approach that is not targeted is going to be more costly and will probably have poorer results. She says that you should prioritise setting your strategy, which means assessing your stakeholder group and spending some time planning how and when you will reach them, and with what message. Once you’ve cracked that, you can move on to actually delivering that strategy through your communications plan.

She has 5 tips for managing your project communications on the cheap. They are:

1. Use your network

“Identify people who can help to deliver the communication strategy,” she writes. In other words, don’t feel you have to rely on an expensive agency or professional communicator such as your PR department. If you can give them a toolkit and some materials, enthusiastic colleagues can be a great asset to your communication plans. They will need to know enough about the project and what you want shared to be able to do a good job. She also suggests finding alternative ways to get them some reward and recognition as they will be taking on the project communication role above and beyond their normal day job.

2. Piggyback off other initiatives

Link in with other projects, programs or corporate initiatives. “This can save resources and is also an effective, best practice communication approach, helping to tell a joined-up story for people,” she says. If another project produces a newsletter, ask to run a small article in it about your project and the joint benefits. Or talk to your central media team and find out if they have templates, newsletters, or anything else you can use or join in with.

3. Use lessons learned

What communication practices worked on other projects? Find out from your corporate lessons learned database or by asking other project managers. Then avoid making the same mistakes (and spending money on them).

Not everyone has access to a lessons learned database, and not all lessons learned meetings include anything about project communications, so you may have to look quite hard before you find anything that you can reuse or learn from.

4. Evaluate your communications

“If something isn’t working then it doesn’t make sense to continue with it,” she writes. “Remember too that if something cheap isn’t working, then it isn’t cheap – it’s a waste of resources.” A communication audit is a good way to evaluate the success of your communications. Spend some time going through what you have communicated and the outcomes it has achieved. If you aren’t meeting your communication goals, then it’s time to think again. For example, an intranet page for your project might be cheap to set up and maintain, but if no one is looking at it then it hasn’t been a success. Think again about how you can reach your audit and tailor your approach accordingly.

5. Use technology

Technology is your friend, because it is cheap and easy. But it only works if people are using it. “There is no point running an online campaign if the project stakeholders have limited access to email or the internet or aren’t users of social media,” Pilkington says. So if your new online product database is aimed at tech-savvy consumers who want to buy from the company directly via the web, then an online communication campaign is going to be a good use of your resources. However, if you are launching a new health service for the elderly in residential homes, they are less likely to be users of social media, so spending lots of time Tweeting about your project isn’t necessarily going to help you reach the people who need to know about it.

You don’t have to spend a lot of cash on project communications, but you should spend enough time on it. The more you plan, the cheaper you can get your project communications because the better prepared and more effective you can make them.

Want to learn to communicate better on your projects? My online course and ebook, Better Project Status Reports, can help you do exactly that. Find out more here.

In this video I look at three more pitfalls to avoid when doing your project estimates. Don't fall into these traps!

In his book, How To Be A Productivity Ninja, Graham Allcott talks about how to manage your time more effectively. It’s a good book, but one of the best things I took away from it was his idea of how you should spend your Friday afternoons (assuming that your working week finishes on a Friday).

He recommends spending time working through a weekly checklist and clearing out your email inbox, reviewing your To Do list, updating your processes, consolidating notes from the week and preparing ahead. So what does that look like in practice? Here are 5 things that you can do on a Friday afternoon to clear your head for the weekend and start the following week with the least possible disruption.

1. Clear your inbox

Allcott is a huge fan of ‘Inbox Zero’ which means not using your email inbox as a dumping ground where emails go to die. He thinks we should all clear out our inboxes, and when better to do that than a Friday, when you’ve got all the messages from the week to look over and deal with.

Go through your inbox and delete anything that can go. File anything that you need to keep for reference. Forward any messages that require other people to do actions on the project with instructions on what you are delegating to them. Anything that takes less than a couple of minutes to do, do now. You’ll probably have to put any other email-related tasks to one side as otherwise you won’t get the rest of your Friday afternoon checklist done.

2. Update your To Do list

What actions have you written in your project notebook or stuck on sticky notes around your monitor this week? Consolidate all that into your master To Do list. I take this a step further by writing the 3 most important tasks for Monday on a sticky note and sticking it on the front of my laptop. Then when I get my laptop out of my bag on Monday morning I know exactly what I should be focused on.

3. Update your files

Make some time to update your filing system and files. Create new folders for stuff if you need to. Otherwise, make sure that your project schedule reflects reality, and that all the risks and issues have up-to-date statuses.

4. Prepare for next week’s meetings

What are you up to next week? Book train or travel tickets. Check meeting room reservations and who is coming to your meetings. Send out agendas if you haven’t done so already, or call round the venues and sort out coffees and teas for people on arrival. It’s easy to put these little admin tasks off during the week but it’s getting a bit late now and you don’t want to be issuing driving and parking instructions on the morning of the meeting, so sort it out now.

5. Review what’s going to stop you

Finally, Allcott suggests thinking critically about what is going to stop you achieving your goals next week. That could be anything from a project team member being off ill, to not having the template for this quarter’s budget submission, to not being able to find time on your calendar to meet with the project sponsor. Once you identify the things that are going to hold up your progress, you can start to think about what you can do about them (if anything). Anything major can go on your project risk log. Anything that is more about your personal productivity can either be dealt with or accepted. Having this time to think about blockers will hopefully make them less stressful when they do happen next week – it’s another sort of risk management to do.

That seems a lot to me for a couple of hours on a Friday, because your project team members won’t stop emailing you or asking questions, and your project sponsor will still expect a weekly report to be produced in the same time slot or to turn up at your desk unannounced and ask for the latest earned value figures to take to the board. But give it a go. I think a period of updating and reflection on the last working day of the week will certainly make it easier to leave the project behind at the office. What do you think?

With CRM being this month’s focus area, making all your systems interact with each other is a key part of being able to get the data you need to feed your CRM system. Your project, therefore, if it has anything to do with IT, systems or data, probably needs some kind of interoperability approach in order to make it possible to pull relevant bits of information out when they are needed.

Think about it for a moment. If you design and build something that is completely standalone that’s good for a short while. But when you need to create a single view of the truth – a single customer record or report showing various data points – you will have to merge data from that system with data held in other systems. Which one is the master data? Even something simple like a customer informing you of a change of address becomes a problem if the systems aren’t linked.

What is interoperability?

Interoperability is that link between systems. This includes things like programming languages. When you are designing a product, think about the environment in which it will operate, who needs to use it and how it will link to, provide data for or send data to other systems. It’s often easier to think about information or data flow rather than the systems themselves, as these can be mapped on afterwards.

Using common standards and programming languages for system builds can save money and make it easier to find technical team members to work on your projects. Using open source tools, for example, is one way to build interoperability into your systems, but of course this will only work if your other systems use the same protocols.

Why is it important to your project?

No project is really standalone. Including interoperability in your design specifications as a non-functional requirement builds in future proofing. It also simplifies making links with other projects and systems which is especially important if your project is being carried out as part of a programme.

How do you get it?

You can’t design in interoperability yourself, although it doesn’t hurt to know that you need it! Involve your firm’s technical architect or, if you are using commercial off the shelf packages, talk to the supplier. A business analyst can help map processes and explain how the business users will actually use the system, so they can be really helpful when it comes to showing where the data comes from and how individual records are used and updated.

The best advice is to look at the big picture from the start of the project. Consider how things connect and consider what might be asked of the system or the project in the future. Of course, you can’t always predict how your new IT package will be used, but you can have a good guess. And you may find that users are already suggesting technical and functional changes that you are having to put into a bucket called ‘Phase 2’ for assessment and analysis later. These features may give you a good idea about the sort of things users will be asking for in the future so you can build in (or at least not shut any doors) for them.

Interoperability is probably already in your company’s technical strategy, so that’s a good place to start if you are building up your project requirements or including constraints in your project initiation document.

It isn’t the most glamorous of project requirements, but if you want your product – be that CRM or something else – to be useful and to be used, then it is worth considering from the outset.

In this video I talk about 4 pitfalls of project estimating.