The Money Files

If you want to let people know about your project, you need to tell them.

Often.

And in lots of different ways.

In my last article about project marketing I wrote about the different ways of getting your message across that you could use from your intranet to a leaflet campaign.

Varying the tools you use to talk about your project is important because people need to hear the same message between 3-5 times before they start to believe it. After that it begins to lose its effectiveness.

It’s more interesting for them to hear it in a variety of ways. And you’re more likely to catch people who have a personal style that means they respond better to different approaches. For example, the intranet isn’t going to be very useful in reaching people that don’t spend a lot of time in front of a PC, like your catering staff. They might prefer to hear about your project through the staff magazine. When you vary your tools you improve the chanced that some of what you are talking about is going to go in.

It’s also beneficial for individuals to hear the message from different people, including someone more senior than them whom they respect. Look for ways that you can include quotes from your Project Board members or invite them to attend events with you.

Avoiding Information Overload

With all this communication happening and the different tools, and the repetition, you’ve got to be careful about creating a balance so that you can avoid information overload. People can and will be fatigued by your messages. You could probably give me examples of marketing messages and advertising that you see so often, like billboards at the side of the road, that you stop noticing it’s there.

Unfortunately, there’s no scientific method for working out when that is going to happen, so I can’t give you a rule to apply. My best tip is to create a communications calendar to run alongside the rest of your communications plan so you can easily see which messages are going out when and to whom. Then you can judge if one audience is receiving too much at any one time, or conversely, not receiving enough.

Be visual

Another way to help balance your messages is to be visual.

YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, with over 1 bn unique visitors per month. Pinterest was the fastest growing social network in 2014, seeing a 97% growth in active users. There’s no doubting that pictures help get your message across.

A study from at the University of Minnesota found that presenters who used visual aids were considered 43% more persuasive (pdf), and as you want to be persuasive about your project it will help you to include images.

Go visual with video

You’ve also got the option to use video. It’s not expensive and you don’t need professional kit to do it any longer.

Here are some screenshots from a video we made about a big software implementation. Originally the project sponsor and I planned to travel to each of the 40 locations to discuss the impact and answer questions directly from a wide group of stakeholders. When we looked at the logistics it wasn’t practical for us to take that much time away from managing the project to solely focus on this communication strand. So we made a video what we would have told them face to face.

You can see here a mix of talking heads, tour round the new servers, screenshots of the software and panning shots of people at work. This was a software project, so even if you are creating something like software that isn’t as visual as, say, a construction project, then you can still create interesting videos with a mix of participation from the project team. It’s fun and engaging for project team to do as well.

This video was watched by key people at all locations and we had excellent feedback on it. You can see how many times your videos are watched through a simple count on YouTube but if you do publish on YouTube then make sure you do so as a private video so only those people with the link can see it.

For us, the video was a simple way to promote the project, reach a wide audience and give people a consistent message without having to meet them individually. On the plus side we probably reached more people than town hall style meetings. On the negative side I had to rely on phone calls, emails and capturing queries via the intranet instead of hearing and responding to questions face to face in real time. There are payoffs and choices in every communication decision!

For more information on project marketing and the tools you can use to communicate about your project, watch my PMXPO talk on the topic. You can get it here (and claim a PDU at the same time).

You first think about how much a project will cost in the initiation stage.

At project initiation, cost management and project financials are really about understanding. Understanding what you are doing and why, and how much you get out and how much you need to put in.

Firstly, consider whether it aligns to the organisation’s financial strategy, and whether it will create a suitable return. You’ll also want to work out how long it will take to get this return, or work with your financial management team to do so.

The project charter should include a description of the financial success of the project and how it will be measured.

You’ll use these as the success criteria for how the project will be judged on financial performance at the end.

You might be able to add costs to any risks mentioned at this point in the project charter.

The tips here are all discussed in more detail in this book Project Management Accounting. It’s a great primer on the financials relating to projects and it goes into a lot of detail so it’s handy for beginners and those with more experience.

Stakeholder engagement doesn’t just happen. You need to work at it, and marketing your project is one way to do that.

What?

OK, let’s start with a definition of marketing as it relates to projects.

Marketing is a planned series of tasks with the objective of promoting your project to a wide audience.

It goes beyond project communications planning because it’s not just about sharing status updates or communicating because you have to. Marketing is the promotional activity to get people to believe in what you are doing and to want in. It’s making sure that your communications plan has an impact beyond the paper it is written on and beyond what’s simply communication on a functional level.

Taking a marketing-led approach to projects does impact project success. In research done by Peter Taylor in 2014, 87% of respondents said that marketing activities have an impact on project success, with nearly half saying it’s a critical activity.

You’ll see that there’s one typical response missing from the graph – the ‘no impact’ response. That’s because no one replied saying that marketing was unimportant. I thought that was interesting – generally people believe marketing is a good idea.

Tools for Marketing in a Project Environment

So if that’s what’s marketing is all about, what tools have we got available to us to do it?

The tools I use most often to communicate with my team and stakeholders are:

• Web conferencing
• Instant messaging
• The good old project status report

This is the one I use to communicate project status to my sponsor. It’s a weekly report. I still send it in a Word document format and it’s one big table, even though I know that tables don’t display well on BlackBerries and the people who are reading it are likely to be travelling and using their BlackBerries a fair amount of the time.

Despite technology moving on, in many respects the way we communicate with our project sponsors follows the tried and tested route.

These tools are good, and form the backbone of any project communication strategy. But there are dozens of ways you can communicate and you don’t have to only rely on them.

Here are some other tools that you can use, many of them are free or at least low cost, so they won’t have too much of an impact on your project budget.

Even if your communication plan and stakeholder analysis tell you that a particular stakeholder likes to receive information by email you should vary your tools from time to time. It helps keep the message fresh. It helps reach a greater audience – and marketing is about reaching a wide audience to spread information about your project.

You can also look for less obvious sources of good PR such as providing information or resources to other teams at short notice – activities that don’t have a blanket reach and might not feel like traditional communication activities but they will create positive engagement on a much smaller scale. That engagement is likely to be deeper than in the case of receiving a mug with the project’s slogan on, so that’s the benefit.

However, you should also bear in mind that communication is a two-way street. Just because you tell someone to do something or ask for their involvement doesn’t mean it will happen. Project communications and marketing can’t just be about pushing messages out there – your tools should include ways to receive messages too.

Some of these tools, especially the ones where you are meeting face-to-face, give you the opportunity to get those messages back. In my experience you’ll still have to ask for them, so ask for feedback and then act on it.

For more information on project marketing and the tools you can use to communicate about your project, watch my PMXPO talk on the topic. You can get it here (and claim a PDU at the same time).

This is an extract from the draft of the second edition of Social Media for Project Managers by Elizabeth Harrin and published by PMI. Consider it a sneak preview for when the book comes out!

The normal approach is to define your strategy, research what you need to do in order to achieve that (both in terms of cultural and non-technical changes and software/infrastructure investment) and then prepare a business case to secure the investment. When the business case has been approved you then go into more detail and fully scope the projects or programs required to deliver on that investment.

However, a full financial business case doesn’t always stack up for collaboration tools for many reasons including:

• The difficulties of measuring intangible results like ‘better collaboration’
• The time it takes to baseline today’s results to compare future performance
• It’s hard to define exactly what return on investment would look like
• The lack of detailed time recording to see whether improvements have been made in productivity and speed of access to experts.

In short, the intangibility and unpredictability of knowledge work makes it hard to quantify anything reliably. Project work by its nature is non-repetitive, and if you have deployed your collaboration tool at the beginning of a project you may not have sufficient experience with that team and on that project to estimate, for example, the length of time tasks are taking with any degree of accuracy. Without that baseline you cannot definitely say that your software has improved the delivery time for tasks. For that reason, many organisations choose not to measure efficiency in a quantitative manner. Instead, companies often rely on employee surveys that in turn rely on subjective responses around whether a tool has made it easier to work together. Make an educated guess based on anecdotal evidence and feedback from the project team.

To give another example, it is difficult to quantitatively measure the positive impact on enabling online communications. How much more useful are project workspaces than a phone call? Bloggers in the public online space often use the amount of comments and social shares received on a blog post as a measure of popularity, interest, engagement with their readers and so on. This is not a reliable measure in a workplace setting: a discussion post may have a couple of comments before you step in and facilitate a face-to-face meeting on the topic, or the commentators pick up the phone to each other to get to the bottom of the finer points. The amount of conversation going on is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of those conversations, so again this is a difficult thing to measure.

The inability to clearly define and measure what you want to achieve will make many project managers uncomfortable (and may force them to choose irrelevant or subjective measures for success). After all, the project charter should include enough detail about scope and acceptance criteria to ensure that the relevant people can sign off the project’s products as complete and fit for purpose. You wouldn’t embark on a project without knowing what ‘finished’ looks like, and knowing who would agree that the work has been completed to the required quality.

However, do you measure how well you wrote the Project Charter or how effective your quality reviews were? Probably not, outside a general feeling that it was a good, comprehensive document or that the meeting participants got what they needed from the review. Collaboration tools are a project support system much like email or conference calls – and would you measure the success of those on a monthly basis? Success criteria are useful, but they do not have to be statistically measurable. Consider the implementation of digital team tools as another option for your project management toolkit. You can measure it with the same judgment calls that you do for the other processes in your methodology.

Don’t struggle with a full financial business case unless you really need one to get your investment approved.

The alternative to a financial business case

If a full financial business case won’t stack up, or your leadership doesn’t require one, then prepare a short options appraisal instead. Review the solutions available to you, using any identified in your strategy document and any others that have come about as part of your general research into delivering the strategy. An options appraisal includes:

• Pros and cons for each option
• Financial investment for each option
• Timescales for implementing each option
• Resource implications for each option
• A recommendation, stating which option you want to go for.

Present this to your decision makers and start the discussion to secure the investment in your collaboration tool.

Alternatively, consider asking for approval at this point only for the analysis phase or a small pilot. This would give you a mandate to go ahead and research the market and how the tools might benefit your teams, while not asking for a financial commitment at this point.

The second edition of Social Media for Project Managers by Elizabeth Harrin will be out next year.