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Viewing Posts by Lynda Bourne
Stakeholder Victory, Without Battle
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| Chinese military general Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War nearly 2,500 years ago. But his ideas still hold value on the art of stakeholder engagement. After all he did say: "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle," which should be the ultimate aim of every stakeholder engagement process. One of the clearest messages from The Art of War is the supremacy of strategy over tactics and tactics over reaction. Yet project teams spend most of their time reacting to stakeholders with a few tactical activities, such as report distribution and progress meetings. This approach gives the initiative to the stakeholders. And, as we all know, not every stakeholder has the project's best interests at heart, and those who are supportive rarely have a deep understanding of your project's real needs. Sun Tzu states that success is driven by strategy: "All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved." Planning your stakeholder engagement should involve far more than simply deciding who needs what information. The starting point for a good strategy is good intelligence. "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles." Project practitioners and their teams need to understand who's important and why; what their attitude to the work is (and why); what you need from them (if anything); and what those people want from you. After this analysis, key questions for the team include:
Now you're in a position to develop a pragmatic strategy to proactively engage with your stakeholder community, focusing on those people who matter. But beware: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." You and your team need to first understand your strategic intent and then develop appropriate tactics to implement the strategy. You could, for example, produce the standard monthly report containing data on your project's environmental protection activities. Or, if you know that several senior stakeholders you need as allies are concerned about your organization's reputation, you could highlight the team's successful environmental efforts with a photo on the cover. No senior manager ever reads a report (particularly all of the boring data on environmental monitoring in the appendix). But they can't miss a cover photo -- or how you're helping them achieve one of their organizational objectives. Smart tactics, minimal effort, and now you now have some powerful friends. Similar approaches can be used to minimize the impact of stakeholders opposed to the project if you understand what's important to them. Sun Tzu clearly shows that engaging with stakeholders requires more than reactive responses. The good news is a well-thought-out strategy -- implemented through nimble and effective tactics -- can virtually eliminate the need for reactive responses and crisis management, resulting in an overall saving of effort. "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." Does your stakeholder-management strategy let you "win first" and then deliver an outcome that benefits your stakeholder community? What other stakeholder wisdom have you picked up from Sun Tzu? |
Adjusting to Team Time Warps
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| Have you ever wondered why one person is always late for meetings while another one is always early? Chances are you're dealing with people who see time differently. For some, time flows from the future into the present and on to the past at a steady rate of 60 minutes every hour. Others see time as a river carrying them forward to an uncertain future. And while everyone is aware of the three elements of time -- the past, the present and the future -- cultures see these in different ways. Western European cultures tend to have a strong future focus -- what's happening in the present is focused on securing a good future outcome. The past is relatively unimportant, since "you can't change history." Cultures with a present focus let go of the past, don't worry about the future and fully enjoy the experience of the present. This focus can be a wonderfully relaxing experience, but it can also lead to the need for immediate gratification and short-term payoffs -- traits of many "youth" cultures. More traditional societies -- for example, those found in Africa, Asia and southern Europe -- tend to have a past focus, looking to preserve their history and respect family and society elders. For them, the present is a continuation of the past, and there's not much point in doing too much planning for an uncertain future. In these societies, the Western view of time as a strictly linear function of seconds, minutes, hours and days is seen as very limiting. Understanding these different perspectives can help you in a project environment. For example, someone with a strong present focus will see the discussion they're currently engaged in as important and consider it inappropriate to cut it off just to be on time for a meeting. But if that meeting is organized by a forward-looking person with a strong time focus, there will be problems. One way to decipher where you and your team members are in the "time warp" is to use U.S. psychologist Thomas J. Cottle's Circle Test. Grab a sheet of paper and draw three circles on the page, arranging them in the way that best shows how you feel about the relationship between the past, present and future. Use different size circles to indicate relative importance and separate or overlap the circles depending on how much influence each one has on the others. Here are two examples that illustrate the different ways people view time: The purple circles represent a strong future focus with the present feeding into achieving future outcomes. There's little connection to the past. This is typical for a lot of time-conscious project managers focused on planning their projects (a future focus) and then implementing the plans (a present focus). The blue circles show a strong present focus firmly grounded in past experiences and traditions. The present is a bit more important than the past, but the future is not really connected to the present and of lesser importance. Don't expect someone with this perspective to be very interested in planning for an uncertain future or being on time for meetings. Their view of success is built on the strength of existing relationships and systems. The Western/project management focus on time can be effective, but it can also be dangerous, particularly in cross-cultural teams and when dealing with clients with a different time focus. The stress of missing an impending deadline can affect people's health, cause then to sacrifice their relationships and lead to shortcuts in quality and missed opportunities. Is it really worth destroying value by de-scoping a project just to achieve a deadline (especially if it's artificial)? A more balanced view may be that while the deadline is missed, there are opportunities to deliver 100 percent of the scope, identify additional hidden value, and maintain a healthier and happier project team. The optimum answer depends on the circumstances of the project and the time focus of key stakeholders. What's your time orientation and how does it fit with the rest of your team and other stakeholders? |
The Power of Happiness
| People talk about motivation, work-life balance and developing a productive team. But only a few realize the importance of happiness within this equation. Look no further than the recent cricket matches between England and Australia for a very interesting case study of the effect of leadership and morale on sustained team performance. I'm not going to explain cricket other than to highlight that it's a team game and that each test match takes up to five days, with six hours of playing time each day. It requires sustained concentration, and outcomes are significantly influenced by the collective expectations and attitude within the team. Unlike many sports, a single star cannot make a huge difference without support from his teammates and the playing time resembles that of a normal workweek. In parts of what was once the British Empire, the game of cricket reigns supreme. One of the sport's major contests is the series of five matches between English and Australian teams every couple of years for "The Ashes." The outcome of each of the five series is of significant national importance -- defeating the "old enemy" makes headline news in both countries. Unusually, in the last nine months, there have been two series played: the first in mid-2013 and the second in the current Australian summer. England won the first series 3-0. And after losses in India and England, the Australian team was written off as "the worst ever" by the local press. But then Australia won the second series 5-0, a feat only accomplished twice before in Ashes history, and now they're national heroes. What caused the change? The difference wasn't in the skills of the players or the support staff (they were basically the same). It was the team's attitude. Prior to the start of the English series, Australia focused on peak performance at all costs. There were rules, curfews and strictly enforced discipline, which led to dissent, internal divisions and disenchantment. The Australian Cricket Board decided a change was needed and appointed Daren "Boof" Lehmann as the new team coach just 16 days before the first English test. The change was too late to make much of a difference in the England series, but by the time the Australian series started, Mr. Lehmann's philosophy had made a fundamental -- and enduring -- change in the Australian team culture. With Mr. Lehmann at the helm, every team member is committed to team excellence. And rather than training drills for the sake of drills to drive performance, players want to improve and develop. The drive is intrinsic, not extrinsic. The most often repeated comment among team members is, "Lehmann made it fun again!" The Australian team members are happy, taking genuine delight in each other's successes as well as providing support and encouragement when things don't go as planned. This transformation will undoubtedly be the subject of research in years to come, but my initial impressions of the key skills Mr. Lehmann has used are:
Applying these techniques takes courage (especially under the glare of national publicity). Building a champion team that enjoys its work and challenges is the challenge for any leader, particularly if you want your team to help you push your project through to a successful conclusion. How do you make your team's work fun when you need high performance? |
Careful -- What You Measure Is What You Get
| "You cannot manage what you cannot measure" is a common mantra of today's business world. But to really make a difference on projects, you also have to make sure you're measuring -- and communicating -- the right things. A policy introduced to measure the performance of our local hospitals a couple years back offers a salient lesson. Our state government decided to incentivize hospitals by rewarding good performance and penalizing poor performance using a standard set of KPIs. The plan created many vested interests:
But an audit found KPI-induced behaviors, in many cases, were worse for patients than if nothing had changed in policy. For example, one key measure was the time patients wait in the casualty/emergency area before being admitted to the hospital. So to avoid a fine for failing to admit the patient within the prescribed maximum time, some administrators were transferring patients from emergency care to the operating theater's waiting area. The action meant a reduction in the level of care, with the patient being moved to an area with little monitoring capability. Throughput in the operating theater was also diminished due to overcrowding and skilled staff having to spend time on patient care rather than surgery. The government had its data and the hospital system responded to the stimulus of the KPI, but everyone forgot the key objective: enhanced patient care. There are a number of important lessons in this story to consider when setting up project dashboards and the like:
Simply identifying a problem and creating a KPI is not enough! Work with the project team to make sure an effective solution is crafted and then measure the effectiveness of the solution. This is far more challenging than simply processing monthly reports on easily accessible information such as schedule performance, but it can really contribute to the overall performance of your organization. Finally, remember that if you pick the wrong KPI, you will get behavior changes, often times for the worse. It's better to have an informed conversation with key stakeholders over value and what really matters. What messages are you sending with the metrics you choose to measure success? |
Determining the Value of Value
| What exactly is value? A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) -- Fifth Edition suggests value is a concept unique to each organization and encompasses the total sum of all tangible and intangible value elements. Determining the tangible ones is relatively straightforward and can easily be reduced to a financial return. More difficult is understanding the intangible value elements the project can create -- and identifying low-cost options with the potential to create massive intangible value by creating favorable outcomes in the minds of stakeholders. One simple example is the practice of cutting small viewing windows in construction site fences. The cost is minimal, but the practice delivers value through improved safety because passers-by don't need to stand near the gate to see what's going on. There's also the public relations value of letting the public see the actual progress of the work. The challenge is finding and tracking these valuable intangibles, bearing in mind most of the value will be created in the minds of various stakeholders. One useful tool is consultant Edward de Bono's Six Value Medals:
Based on those, we can perform a "value scan" when determining courses of action within the project and prioritize actions to achieve the values that matter most. Take a simple example. The last office refit covered up a duct in the wall of the CEO's new office. Now your project has to rip the sidewall out to access the duct and upgrade the cabling. Where's the extra value? Some possible medal ideas include:
There are probably other possibilities as well depending on the actual project. How do you assess the value of your project to your stakeholder community? |