The Money Files

In this video I talk about the 5 project costs you might have forgotten to account for in your budget.

For more details, this article has more about the costs you might have overlooked.

This month we’re talking about all things outsourcing and there’s nothing more important than communication when it comes to making an outsourcing partnership work.

More specifically, there’s nothing more important than trusted communication. People can be sceptical about outsourcing arrangements and if you want the partnership to really work it has to be built on trust.

In other words, you want them to believe the information that is in your status reports and other comms and to take what you say at face value. They should trust you to report the right things and they should trust the content in the report itself to be truly representative of the project today.

Here’s how to make your project communications trustworthy, and it’s easier than you might think!

First, there should be no surprises for your sponsor.

Whether you are working for a client or internally, reports aren’t the best way to find out about major project problems. There are other ways that you can do that. You should put big problems in your reports but only once you have cleared them through other communication routes.

Share The Reports With The Team

You should send your reports to your team members as well. I mention that because I know not everyone does it by default. Sometimes reports only go to stakeholders, clients, users, customers but not the people who are doing the job.

The fastest way to build trust between you and the team is to not drop them in it. You don’t want your reports to be full of blame and things that come as a surprise to them. This isn’t the way that they should find out about changes or schedule amendments. You have other routes open to you to inform them about those, although of course they should be mentioned in your reports once everyone knows about them.

Mostly we think of formal project reporting and communication as something we do to people outside the project team. But you have to have your team on side. They are ambassadors for your project and they need to be talking about it and promoting the benefits of your project with the people they work with and meet.

They will provide you with updates for your standard communications but they’ve got to understand current status and be able to field questions from your users or their colleagues as well, and they can do that better through understanding the big picture, whether they are on the outsourcing side or the customer side.

Stay on Message

Everyone hears the same version of the story, whatever their position. It undermines your communication efforts if different stakeholders are receiving different versions of the truth.

Staying on message limits the impact of your message being changed as people share it with their colleagues.  It’s also surprisingly easy for a team member to undermine your efforts about talking positively about your project, even if they don’t mean to, with a few off-hand remarks.

Finally on this, you’ll be more trusted as an individual if your team feels that you are representing their work properly in your reports, and they’ll believe that you are sharing everything with them if the reports are a transparent reflection of the work. If they see – whether they are a colleague or part of the management team – things in there that they weren’t expecting then they could start to feel that you are hiding things or simply that you aren’t on top of it all.

The Benefits of Trustworthy Reporting

The main benefit to come out of being trustworthy when communicating about your project is simply that people trust you. This is huge in project management and leadership because someone with good credibility who is trustworthy will find it much easier to get work done through other people. Your reputation counts for a lot.

You’ll also save time because you’ll believe what they are telling you and you won’t have to go routing around for a different version of the truth, or spend too much time trying to put what they’ve told you in a way that’s acceptable to the stakeholders.

When people feel confident that they can give you the truth about a problem and you aren’t going to turn that against them, then you’ll find it easier to make your reports accurate because they’ll tell you the truth from their side too.

Outsourcing relationships can work and be hugely successful (and I’ve seen some of those in action) but you need great communications based on trust and teamwork to really get the benefits of why you outsourced in the first place.

In this video I talk about the option of PM knowledge repositories that can support your training efforts as a PMO. And they are cost-effective if you have a lot of people to upskill or support at a time.

Last month I looked at the 5 questions to ask during benefits identification, based on information from the latest PMI Pulse report into benefits realisation.

This month I want to look at what happens next. You’ve asked those questions and got some vague but helpful answers. How do you turn them into concrete documentation that explains the project’s benefits to everyone concerned?

Luckily, the Pulse report has the answers in the form of 5 activities to do which help you define your benefits.

I’ve listed them below, along with my interpretation of what this means and how you could potentially incorporate the tasks into your project plan.

1. Defining the objectives and critical success factors

This is the same as you would do for any project, so I don’t think that you’ll need any special help here. You should set the objectives for your project and make sure that you understand how success will be measured in the eyes of the stakeholders.

Schedule the work: Set up some workshops with the right people to ensure that everyone is on the same page about the project vision. Document it and refer to it often.

2. Recognising and quantifying business benefits

In 40% of projects, the Pulse report states that this responsibility falls to the functional area VP or Director who could realistically be acting as the sponsor. Now you know the overall objectives for the project you need to think about how these translate into benefits for the organisation. You also need to know how they are going to be measured, or in what way you could assess whether you have actually achieved the stated benefits.

Schedule the work: Talk to the person or group responsible for the identification of benefits and get their views on what these should be. Start a conversation with your team about how you could build in deliverables that make benefits tracking easier.

3. Developing meaningful metrics and key performance indicators to measure the actual delivery of benefits and planned benefits

Turn those measures into a dashboard or concrete, measurable output that means something to the team and the people who are looking at it.

Schedule the work: Create a work package or work breakdown structure entry that reflects the work you have to do in order to build a mechanism for developing the metric. This could be as easy as creating new report, or it might take a lot longer and a lot more thought. Make sure you know who will be using this report (or whatever) so that you can get them to test it, and schedule in the testing activity too.

Remember that in order to see and measure a change in result, you have to have a baseline. That will probably involve doing measurement of the current state of affairs e.g. cycle time, to see if it changes in line with your expectation for benefits once the project has completed.

4. Establishing processes for measuring progress against benefits plan

You’ve got your baseline and your way of tracking, but when are you going to see those benefits and how much are you expecting at any one time? You can also think about when you are going to stop measuring the benefits – for example, you could take the benefit in this financial year and then not track it next year, considering it a business-as-usual situation by then.

Define a process – weekly, monthly? As part of that, cover off who is going to be the process owner and who is doing the work.

Schedule the work: Make sure that you have clarity about who is going to do the measuring. If it’s your project team, add time and tasks to their workload to allow for this, along with a plan for how you are going to hand this over to someone else once the project completes.

You’ll need a benefits plan to track against, so write or get one of those.

5. Creating a communications plan necessary to record progress and report to stakeholders

I don’t think it is worth having a separate plan for this as you could find that some of your comms activities are then in conflict. It’s definitely worth including benefits messaging in your normal project comms work too, so that a much wider audience gets to hear about all the great results that your project is getting.

Schedule the work: Put benefits identification and realisation communication tasks in your normal communications plan.

Hopefully this gives you some idea of the kind of work that goes into identifying benefits. It’s not rocket science but it can be time-consuming, especially if you haven’t had much experience as a company of thinking in a benefits-led way before.

Take the time and do it right, and you’ll get much better project results overall!

Read the whole report here: http://www.pmi.org/learning/pulse.aspx

In my new book, Collaboration Tools for Project Managers, I explore the opportunities for project teams working with new technology.

Here are two emerging themes in both project management and in social and collaborative technologies that are worth knowing about.

1. Digital PMOs and the Role of the Digital Leader

Disruptive technologies such as big data are hitting businesses across all functional areas, not just project management. Companies have to come up with practical ways to incorporate this massive amount of change and to sift through the trends that are worth adopting while ditching those that are not relevant at this time.

This is starting to come to the fore in the form of the chief digital officer or other digital leadership position at the very top of businesses. We are also seeing digital PMOs—divisions supporting the project structure in the way a traditional PMO would, but with a leaning toward paperless, integrated, and online ways of working, along with the culture changes that brings.

2. The Culture of Collaboration

It’s not all about the tech. Part of the challenge facing the digital leader, be that a project manager or a PMO director, will be managing flatter teams, both across business teams and within projects.

Employees will create their own internal networks outside of the traditional hierarchy, which potentially makes many of the formal line management structures redundant and forces the organization to become flatter. The digital divide—those employees who are familiar with digital working practices and those who are not—is a further team-related problem that digital leaders have to face up to and proactively manage.

"If virtual teams are to be successful, and if collaboration tools are to be fully embedded in the working practices of the team, then it’s important for businesses to invest in collaboration offline as well."

Successful collaboration and teamwork comes from a culture that supports those ways of working. If virtual teams are to be successful, and if collaboration tools are to be fully embedded in the working practices of the team, then it’s important for businesses to invest in collaboration offline as well.

We’ll see greater investment in building corporate culture, fostering employee engagement, and creating the environment to deliver successful change. All of this underpins the use of any technology and supports the business objective of getting the right people to do the right things the first time, which cuts down on overall project costs.

3. Knowledge Sharing

A collaborative culture also supports the urgent need for knowledge sharing in a global economy that is facing significant talent gaps. As the Baby Boomer generation leaves the workplace, taking with them an incredible amount of organizational knowledge, companies need to find alternative ways to capture and maintain their knowledge assets. Technology (like wikis) has a part to play, as well as collaborative work environments where knowledge is freely shared.

What trends have you noticed?

If you're interested in finding out more about how project teams can benefit from using collaboration tools, you can get a copy of the book from the PMI Marketplace here.