Voices on Project Management

If you’re new to project management, mastering negotiation skills is going to provide you with an invaluable asset to cope with real-life situations that drive project managers crazy sometimes.

If you’re a seasoned project manager, you’ll probably wish you’d read this post before!

In fact, negotiation skills offer many benefits to project managers. Most important, they:

• Equip you with tools and techniques to resolve differences and to mend hard feelings, instead of avoiding them
• Help you to build relationships with stakeholders
• Provide you with strategies to clarify expectations
• Improve your chances of getting support while also keeping conflict to manageable levels
• Facilitate a deeper understanding of stakeholders' needs, expectations and agendas

The term “negotiation” derives from Latin roots. Its original meaning likely won’t surprise you:

• “neg” means “not”
• “otium” means “leisure”

Negotiating isn’t easy. That’s why most people try to avoid or withdraw from negotiations. But doing this makes you worse off, increasing the chances of being exploited and bullied.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself: Did any stakeholder take advantage of you in a recent negotiation? Maybe your boss shouted at you, “Why are you still planning—when are you going to start doing some work?” Or perhaps a client asked, “It is just a small change to the requirements. Can’t you get it done by next week?”

Here are the Ten Commandments of negotiating with project bullies:

1. Prepare before starting to negotiate

2. Don’t be emotional. Don't take it personally

3. Always be honest

4. Put yourself in “their shoes”

5. Know your BATNA—the best alternative to a negotiated agreement

6. Identify the zone of potential agreement

7. Learn how to say no

8. Think long-term

9. Understand that every problem is an opportunity

10. Whenever possible, improve relationships and build trust

Have you ever taken a negotiation course? Or did you read a great book on negotiation that helped you as a project manager? Please share your thoughts, suggestions and experiences below.

By Peter Tarhanidis

Many organizations rely on traditional curriculum-based learning to develop project leaders. However, such approaches are deeply rooted in pedagogy—the teaching of children.

Even though top managers at many organizations invest in traditional project management curricula, these courses have limited utility for adult project managers, slowing down the organization from reaching goals. In my experience, organizations tend to employ disparate training methodologies while teams dive into execution with little planning. With scattered approaches to talent management and knowledge transfer, they miss project goals.

All this creates an opportunity for an enterprise-wide approach that integrates contemporary adult learning and development practices.

Leveraging this approach allows the organization to motivate and sustain increased individual and project performance to achieve the organization’s strategic plan.

In coming up with such an approach, organizations should consider several adult learning and development theories. For example, consider Malcolm Knowles’ six aspects of successful adult learning: self-directed learning, building experiences, developing social networks, the practicability of using new knowledge, the internal drive to want to understand why, and how to use new knowledge.

And they must also keep in mind how the aging project management workforce of project managers drives organizational performance. Other considerations include:

1. Employee learning is necessary due to fast-paced changes in demographics, technology and globalization. But those employees are already busy staffing the growing demands of strategic initiatives.
2. Adult learning models should be the foundation of your training programs.
3. Traditional adult development theories must expand to include integrative learning models.
4. Self-directed learning must integrate new transformational approaches that provide for content delivery and experiential learning.
5. The impact of cognitive development processes on intelligence and aging can yield new and useful approaches to teaching and learning.

Try these eight steps to build a more flexible and integrated adult learning framework. 

1. Identify self-directed approaches for employees to acquire knowledge, information and skills, and readily apply them to meet organizational outcomes.
2. Create a learning environment that helps make sense of practitioner situations and allows for reflective dialogues to create solutions to problems and new knowledge.
3. Sponsor internal networks, social media and gaming/simulation technology to distribute information.
4. Define clear levels of learning that can be achieved by moving across boundaries. Examples of such boundaries can be small, medium, large projects or local, national, global projects.
5. Leverage experts to instruct groups. If the organization is seen to value the role of teacher, others will want to teach as well, reinforcing a continuous cycle of development.
6. Encourage learning on the job, so that an employee’s learning is based on understanding the effects of his or her actions in an environment.
7. Launch communities of practice that are based on the influence of the community to develop the group expertise.
8. Engage quick feedback through co-participation or co-emergence of learning based on everyday interactions through peers, leaders or certain situations.

New integrative learning approaches are required to increase project managers’ competence while motivating and sustaining older adult learners.

By applying these practices to critical needed competencies, organizations can create new capabilities to meet their strategic plans.

By Lynda Bourne

Project stakeholders can be helpful, obstructionist and almost everything in between. The good news is that how you deal with most stakeholders is largely up to you! The only certainty is your stakeholders are not about to go away and leave you in peace.

As you’ll see below, there are three basic ways to deal with stakeholders.

1) Crisis Management

With this approach, you basically choose to ignore the stakeholder problem until something dramatic happens—and then you react to deal with what has become a crisis! 

Doing nothing may seem like a good idea when confronted with all of the other demands of the project, but this is misguided. When the crisis erupts, you are reacting to someone else’s agenda. This places you in a vulnerable situation. The atmosphere is typically hostile, and the time and effort needed to recover the situation can easily exceed the time and effort needed to employ alternative options.

2) Stakeholder Management

This approach is proactive rather than reactive. By proactively managing your stakeholder community, you will eliminate most of the crises and be in a much stronger position to deal with any issues that do “blow up.” 

Stakeholder management involves identifying the members of your stakeholder community, recognizing their needs and expectations, and implementing a planned communication strategy to maximize their support for the project and minimize any opposition.

Through regular, planned communication activities, you seek to identify issues and problems before they become significant. You take appropriate steps to exploit opportunities and defend against emerging threats and problems. As with any management function, the manager seeks to control and optimize the situation.

This is essentially a “push” process and includes elements such as reporting, public relations (PR) and, in larger projects and programs, may extend to customer relationship management (CRM).

3) Stakeholder Engagement

This approach requires a paradigm shift in thinking! Rather than trying to manage stakeholders to achieve the predetermined outcome your project was established to deliver, stakeholder engagement invites stakeholders to become part of the process designed to fulfill their requirements.

The solution delivered through the project evolves and adapts based on the interaction between the project team and its key stakeholders. Opening up to stakeholders and inviting them to be part of the solution requires letting go of the concept of “one correct solution.”

In place of the answer, the project team and stakeholders work together to develop an agreed-upon outcome. 

The concept of stakeholder engagement is a central tenet of the Agile Manifesto. But agile approaches aren’t the only way to open up the power of stakeholder engagement. Many modern forms of project contracts, typically used on major construction and engineering contracts, recognize that collaboration between key stakeholders reduces risk and increases the value of the project for everyone. 

Alliance contracts, early contractor involvement (ECI) contracts, and various forms of partnerships and supply chain arrangements all seek to replace the command-and-control management approach to delivering defined outcomes, based on inflexible contract conditions, with collaborative working arrangements focused on achieving a mutually beneficial outcome.

Breaking habits formed over decades of “hard contracting,” and the almost routine litigation that follows, is not easy. But it does seem to be worth the effort.

Numerous surveys (primarily in the U.K. construction sector) have consistently shown that the client gets a better outcome for less cost and the contractors make more profits working in a collaborative environment where everyone is pulling in the same direction. Similar results have emerged from projects employing agile approaches, where the magic trifecta of “better, cheaper and quicker” seems to be regularly achieved.

So my question to you is: Are you still operating in crisis management mode when it comes to stakeholders? Or have you moved toward effective stakeholder management? And are you willing to take the plunge and go for full-on stakeholder engagement? 

Stakeholder engagement is not an easy option. It requires a range of skills quite different from traditional stakeholder management, but the results are definitely worth the effort! The beauty of stakeholder engagement is that you open up to your stakeholders and allow them to help you successfully deliver their requirements.

It’s a real win-win outcome.

By  Rex M. Holmlin

As project managers, we would like our projects to be successful. Successful projects are more fun and, as a general proposition, our bosses like it better when our projects are successful. But how can we set our projects up for success?

A helpful first step is to define what success is. For many of us, that means meeting scope, cost and schedule targets. However, I will argue that there are three levels of project success we should think about:

1. Project-level success

2. User-level project success

3. Enterprise-level project success

For a project to be truly successful, we must be successful on each level. 

Project-level success is the area most of us are most familiar with. Success at this level means we meet our scope, cost and schedule objectives. When we meet these objectives, many of us are looking for a ticker tape parade down the hallway. However, we are only looking at part of the success equation.

User-level success means delivering the benefits that the users desire from the project. While our users, and other stakeholders, may be interested in scope, cost and schedule objectives, the truth is we can meet project-level objectives and still have a project that does not deliver the benefits the users and stakeholders were looking for.

At the enterprise level, senior leaders in our organization are interested in having the projects that we execute make a positive contribution to key metrics at the enterprise level (profit targets are one example). We can meet project-level objectives, but not make a contribution to key enterprise-level metrics.

In a recent webinar, I asked the participants whether their organizations defined success at each of these levels. Approximately two-thirds of attendees felt their organizations had well-defined project-level objectives, but less than half of those felt their organizations set clear and well-defined user/stakeholder- and enterprise-level objectives

It is often quite challenging to meet scope, cost and schedule objectives. However, our projects will still fail if we do not deliver the benefits users and other stakeholders desire and make a contribution to key enterprise-level metrics. As project managers, we need to ask questions about the benefits users desire, and understand the key enterprise-level metrics we can contribute to. The more specific we are, the greater the chance we will have a successful project. When it comes to project success, ignorance about the other levels of project success is not bliss.

Please drop me a note and let me know if your organization defines all three levels of project success.

Transitioning from small to large projects can be daunting, but big projects are not necessarily more problematic. You are still using the same leadership skills. You should be continuing with the same oversight on details and risks. You should remain constant with communication flows—going back and forth with stakeholders.

The main area of concern for either size project is the scale you use. Here are three areas of measurement to pay particular attention to when moving to big projects.

Your workload will be different. You may choose to use fewer tools for a small project, while in a large project, the tools you choose to use will have more criteria to include. For example, you may not need a fully elaborated communications plan for a small project. For a large project, however, such items as messages to stakeholders will most likely have more approval reviews before distribution, and you will need to monitor this more closely. 

Project tasks will be viewed differently. The project plan could increase from 50 items to hundreds with more responsible resources to track. Dependencies, delays, milestones and deadlines could come from directions requiring more consideration. Plan negotiations of these more carefully, because Impacts could be more detrimental in a large project.   

The success of a project is worthwhile to the stakeholders no matter the size of the project. However, the budget and the planned vs. actual actions will hold more significance in a larger project. There will also be cause to celebrate a win for any size project. But in a large project, success or nonsuccess will most likely be more visible and hold a heavier weight. Be prepared to conduct more testing and verifications.

Ask yourself if less is more to be concerned about, or if more is less to be concerned about. Your answer should be in the measurement of the end result.

What do you find important to not overlook when transitioning from a small project to a large project and vice versa?