The Money Files

We do a lot of our reporting in PowerPoint, which is a tool I like using. However, it does often involve recreating data from other sources on a slide so it can be included in a deck. Over the years, I’ve noticed a shift towards more visual forms of reporting, like dashboards and slides.

Slides lend themselves to graphical story telling far better than documents, and are good for the busy exec who wants to flick through the headlines without getting lost in the many pages of a PID or project plan. We all use a lot of words for our reporting, but if you’re trying to get your message across, making your reports more visual can make a difference.

Here are some advantages to consider.

Charts and graphs make your documents shorter

Charts, graphs and tables make your documents shorter because you can say more in a small space.

Visuals make your documents more concise and impactful, perfect for the busy senior manager who just wants to skim. Let’s face it, we all have information overload and busy brains, so the less work they have to do to understand the point, the better. Shorter documents reduce cognitive load and aid retention, so they might even remember the point next month!

Colours highlight status

You’re probably familiar with Red/Amber/Green colour coding for projects. The judicious use of colour makes it easy to see status at a glance. That means execs can focus in on the projects that need management attention.

Watch out for how you use colour though, to make sure your reports are accessible to all stakeholders: readers with colour deficiency or people who prefer to print content in black and white won’t automatically understand your statuses unless you use the words too.

Data presents the facts

Worried about how your sponsor might spin project status? If you present the facts in graphical format, that will support the narrative. Even if your sponsor says everything is wonderful, sharing (for example) the number of red/high risks or open issues is a way to draw attention to the fact not everything is going as well as it could. Data, in graphical format, leads to objective reporting.

Having said that, I’m sure you’ve heard people say that you can spin data in any way. So make sure your sources are clear and that you report like-for-like measures month-on-month for comparison. Links to drill down into the data will show that you value transparency.

If you want to get better at visual reporting, think about where the data is coming from and how you can present it. I got some amazing tips from the book Good Charts by Scott Berinato. It is an eye-opening look at how to position your data for maximum understandability and storytelling.

As well as the analytical thinking that you’ll want to do before you present any data, it’s also worth brushing up your technical skills, whether that’s a quick PowerPoint course or making sure you know how to use all the dashboarding and customisation features of your project management software, so you can get the data out in a format that makes it easy to share and talk about.

Lots of common project metrics lend themselves well to being presented visually: timelines, budget allocations, pie charts of risk ratings and so on. Why not experiment with what you can make more visual in your next project update?

Psychological safety, as I think of it, is the way that you show up at work and how much risk you feel yourself in when expressing your opinions or when choosing a course of action.

If it feels ‘safe’ you’ll speak up when things are wrong, suggest new ideas and call out bad behaviour. If it doesn’t feel safe, you’ll keep your head down.

On a project team, psychological safety is important because you want people to challenge poor ideas or speak up when they see a better way of doing things. And also because we are nice leaders and we want people to be happy at work, without second-guessing what their boss is going to think all the time.

In an environment where psychological safety is present, people feel that it is safe to take risks. They might try a new solution or propose a new way of working. They might come up with an idea and implement it, or opt for a new technology over a proven one because it might be better.

They also feel that it is safe to speak up and express ideas. They’ll speak in meetings, bounce ideas around, build on other people’s ideas and say when they don’t think an idea will work.

The benefits are clear.

You will see better team collaboration. People will be more creative and prepared to innovate. You should end up with better problem-solving and decision-making. And it will feel like a nice place to work surrounded by professional adults.

How do you know if you’ve got psychological safety in the team?

It’s probably easier to look at what the environment looks like if you don’t have psychological safety.

You’ll see:

• Lack of participation in meetings.
• Fear of retribution
• Fear of embarrassment.

People might not say out loud: I was too embarrassed to say what I thought, but you might pick up on it either through one-to-one conversations or body language.

If you want to find out more, you could survey the team or use other feedback methods, but if the environment doesn’t feel like one where you can speak freely, frankly I don’t think you’ll get a lot of good out of those methods. It is probably best to build good relationships with some of the people who exhibit more confidence or who contribute the most and talk to them openly about your worries for the team.

The trouble with projects is that they happen inside the culture of the organisation, so while you might want to create an environment where people feel safe, if the rest of the organisation isn’t backing you up, that can be tricky.

How to create a safer environment

In your leadership role, you can model vulnerability and openness. Share what you’re comfortable sharing. Lead by example. Be consistent in your actions and expectations and demonstrate the behaviours you want to see.

Encourage and reward contributions. Let people know you appreciate their ideas even if you don’t end up using them.

Value diverse perspectives. Ask for them, incorporate them and let people know that their voices are being heard. Again, if they share their perspective and you can’t do anything with it or affect any change, at least pass that back to them.

A lot of what you can do centres on establishing norms for respectful communication. For example, regularly ask for feedback, through anonymous suggestion methods if necessary (and people are wary of Microsoft forms not being truly anonymous). Handle conflict early when you spot it, and look out for those people who are showing signs of being resistant to change and support them.

Schedule some team-building activities, but not awkward cringey ones, things that the team actually will be interested in doing.

Over time, hopefully you’ll see that the feeling in the team has changed. I think it’s a hard thing to measure, but you might see results through employee surveys, perhaps in responses to do with belonging, or feeling understood/appreciated etc.

What’s more evident is that you’ll probably feel it. You can observe the team dynamics and notice what is different. However, you don’t want to lose that and slip back into old ways, so keep psychological safety on the agenda. Ask people how they feel about working in the team now, and what else you could do together to encourage good working practices. Then act on their suggestions.

Are you working with a new project team? Here are some tips for getting your team past Storming and Norming and into the zone of Performing.

Use a shared language

Use vocab and process names that are meaningful within the team, and make sure everyone uses the same terminology.

Chances are, if your project team members have been around a while they will know the in-house language of projects. However, you might have some specific project language that everyone needs to be onboard with. For example, is it Phase 2, Stage 2 or Tranche 2?

Build and share experience

Do you know the background of your colleagues? Can you recall the projects they have worked on? Take the time to call out and share the experience you have collectively. Celebrate successes and give everyone the chance to shine.

What you’re trying to do is build respect and understanding for what people bring so you can shortcut some of the ‘I don’t know if she’s ever done that before’ worries that the team might have about each other.

Foster an environment where trust is the norm

I know that trust isn’t always something you should assume, but in the workplace, trust people to do their jobs until they show you otherwise. Don’t make them jump through hoops just to do the roles they are hired to do.

Actively create resilience

Create resilience in the team by promoting wellbeing activities and encouraging the team to collaborate. You can also take practical steps like making sure project team members have a deputy who can step in when they are off, and that there is resilience in the resourcing plan in that you have enough people to do the job.

Build resilience into your solutions too, so you aren’t trying to run a network on a single server.

Share lessons learned

Make it normal to share lessons learned across the team. When you’re still learning how things work in this new environment, it can speed up adopting new (successful) ways of working but it also takes a bit of vulnerability.

If that’s a problem, focus on sharing the ‘this worked well so we’ll do it again’ lessons and keep the ‘what didn’t work’ conversations to your one-on-one chats.

Manage anxiety

Being in a new team is anxiety-provoking. Will they like us, what will they think of the way I do my work? Focus on psychological safety and setting expectations that are reasonable and manageable – for example, not expecting overtime, not emailing them on the weekends and giving people enough time to do tasks before you chase them.

Live the vision

Finally, make sure the team is aware of the common vision for the project. Talk about your hopes for the future and the goals you want to achieve together. OK, it takes more than a quick chat in a team meeting to create a genuine sense of wanting to work together to achieve a goal, but it sets the tone and gives people an understanding of the ‘why’ behind the project.

Tie your decisions back to the vision, reference it often and challenge activities that don’t lead you closer to it.

You can’t magically get to a performing team overnight, but these activities will help you start off on the right path so you reach a good standard of project performance together as quickly as possible.

In my early days as a project manager, my business cases and PIDs were full of non-quantifiable benefits. The kind of improvements that I thought we could get but weren’t set up to track.

In my more recent years, I’ve been heavily focused on quantifiable benefits, most specifically the money-related ones. Anything that presents a trackable, cash improvement is something to focus on. If it improves the bottom line, managers want to know about it.

There are also quantifiable benefits that are harder to track like reducing cycle time for invoicing and reducing energy consumption. These would lead to financial savings, but they are more difficult to pin down and measure realistically with no other influencing factors. Cycle time, for example, may lead to bills being paid faster which would lead to better cash flow and increased bank interest, but how do you separate that out as a benefit of just this project and not something to be attributed to one of the many other projects that are doing their bit for continuous process improvement?

Energy consumption can be tracked, but it’s several steps and calculations – it’s doable but harder. That’s not to say we shouldn’t do it, but it is something that you have to put effort into tracking.

Non-quantifiable benefits seem to have dropped out of favour. For example, staff satisfaction survey results is a good one that I used to mention a lot in project documentation. However, there are lots of things that influence staff satisfaction, and I’m sure my projects only played a very small part in influencing the results one way or another.

Also, new initiatives that once seemed completely life changing and a huge improvement quickly become ‘the way things work around here’ and the benefit tails off to nothing. No one would want to go back to the old process, but equally no one is celebrating the new process 6 months later when it’s just normal BAU.

I learned this on a Six Sigma course I took many years ago where the instructor talked about giving customers a biscuit with their coffee in a coffee shop. At first customers were excited they were getting a biscuit for free, but over time they came to expect that service and were disappointed when they didn’t get it, but not more happy because they did.

Therefore there is a balance to be struck with benefits: you want a mix of both quantifiable (financial and other) and non-quantifiable. But not so many that they all become meaningless. And not so few because you can’t be bothered to put the tracking mechanisms in place for more.

Be realistic about what you can achieve with benefits and how much time people really are going to spend on tracking the more difficult ones. If they believe that it’s worth tracking, they’ll do it, but if they feel energy consumption, for example, is tracked adequately through other types of environmental reporting or projects, they probably won’t be falling over themselves to create project-specific benefits reporting.

Talk to the key stakeholders about what sort of benefits you are putting forward for a project and make sure they are reasonable, measurable (where possible) and realistic.

Who do you consult when a project gets going? Or when you want to put forward an idea for a new project but need to run it past some key stakeholders?

One issue I had on a project recently was that we didn’t involve our IT subject matter expert early enough. While that didn’t slow down the project, it did mean we’d made extra work for them, which isn’t kind, and I’m sure they felt like an afterthought, which is not the relationship I want to have with my stakeholders.

So learning from that, here are some of the key stakeholder groups and subject matter expert teams that you should be talking to at the beginning of a new piece of work.

IT

Let’s put them first! Talk to your technical colleagues to find out if they can advise on the best solution.

Operations

Operations are the group that keep the organisation working, so they run the day to day functions of your business. The teams are going to be different depending on what your business does, but they will know whether your project is going to have an impact on frontline staff and the operators.

Finance

Talk to your finance team to find out whether there are any special requirements for this kind of project. For example, what are the funding options, how will financial benefits be tracked, whether contingency or management reserves are available and whether there will be a finance analyst available to support the work.

They might be able to give you and idea of what budget is available in the portfolio which will help you scale the work.

PMO

Talk to the PMO about resourcing, scheduling and estimating and securing project resource. Generally, in my experience if you are the project manager involved at the start of a discovery or concept phase, then you’ll also be the one that carries on leading the work as it moves forward. But not always, so make sure if you need project support that you’ve got a PM and/or analyst assigned to the work and that they understand what is expected.

Finally, don’t forget to include the senior leadership in your consultation. As a key stakeholder, they’ve got the power to say they don’t want the work to go ahead after all because something has changed. Equally, having their support for projects that are moving is invaluable because they’ll be able to support and champion from the top.

Legal, compliance and data protection

I’ve bundled legal, compliance and data protection into one group but you probably have separate teams responsible for each function. Talk to each of the departments to make sure that your project is viable and meets with all the required regulations and policies.

Communications

If you have an internal comms team, talk to them about the project and what support you can expect from them. For example, they might be able to help with drafting project newsletters and briefings, and creating slides to share at leadership meetings.

HR

If your project affects people’s jobs in any way, consult with your Human Resources team. There might need to be consideration given to job descriptions, recruitment, the onboarding and induction process, training and more. HR-related changes can take some time so it’s worth getting them involved early.

Specialist teams

If your project involves manufacturing, talk to them. If you need engineers, get input from them. If you have a big marketing expectation, bring the marketeers onboard at this point and get their thoughts. Work out what specialist subject matter expert teams are relevant to your work and include them.

What other teams would you include by default? I’m sure there are some I’ve forgotten!