An Influential Project Manager

Risks and opportunities are both events that could affect your progress towards the goal you are focusing on. Risks hinder, and opportunities help. By considering both, you can potentially find new ways to link your agenda to others, or detach it from those that don't help — if you can.

• What is happening elsewhere in your organisation that could give your project or goal a major boost?
• What is the most exciting thing going down currently? What part does your work play in it, or could play?
• How is your work connected to the big problems in the organisation? Does it need to be that way?
• What are the powerful people doing? Why should they be more interested in what you are doing?
• What opportunities should you be attaching too?
• What risks should you be trying to avoid or mitigate?

Let's Connect...

It is always good to connect, so feel free to reach out to me either here on the Project Management website or on LinkedIn. See you soon!

Think about your strategy in terms of the key things you need to influence to achieve your goal. These may be stepping stones of influence — achieve this, and then achieve that. Alternatively, your strategy could be to influence many different things which are independent of each other — getting 8/10 teams backing your proposal may be enough to achieve your goal.

As you think it through, consider all other analysis you have been doing:

• The organisational strategy and political environment.
• How your project/goal fits with other projects and goals.
• The political agendas of the most powerful people around you.
• The scenarios that could unfold over the next 6-12 months.

Then, answer these two questions:

1. What influence needs occur to achieve your goal?
2. What other influence would help your progress?

Then develop simple headlines for the sub-goals you need to deliver.

Unless you understand what is going on at a political level around your project, you are unlikely to be totally effective at making things happen in any reasonable sized organisation.

Each organisation is full of powerful and ambitious people with agendas. If you invest time on a regular basis deepening your knowledge of the way people are pursuing their objectives, you will be able to increasingly develop the most successful strategy for what you are doing.

You will also be in an extremely good position to defend yourself proactively. It is not necessary (or even desirable) to become Machiavelli, but you do need to learn what is really going on.

• What problems and challenges is your organisation facing?
• What strategy is it adopting to meet these?
• Who are the key players involved in this strategy?
• How do their agendas match and mismatch?
• What will change in the next six or twelve months?
• How does all of this affect your project?

Interesting conversation today with an investment banker.

He is highly analytical, data specialist, concerned with advising IPO potentials. His specialism is finding the patterns in the data and extracting commercial value for his clients.

When it comes to politics, he is mystified, he cannot see the patterns. He thinks it chaotic.

Yet, with politics, the patterns are there, but unless you recognise them, they will do you head in, and frustrate your execution. Once you see the patterns, things become much clearer. Still, you may not be able to do anything about it, but the insight makes it easier to cope.

In fact, pattern recognition is one of the advanced capabilities I work with on my courses to master the politics. For this investment banker, it is about turning his analytical eye from the patterns in the data to the patterns in the social interactions.

Can you recognise the patterns?

Colin

PS: Delighted to see that my webinar How to Manage Project Politics has been fixed and restored to the OnDemand library here at the PMI.

Projects are littered with meetings with nobodies. People who have been delegated to by stakeholders. These people dutifully turn up (if you are lucky), make lots of helpful(?) comments and suggestions, but will not be willing to make any decisions.

Instead, they defer, distract, or simply nod and do nothing.

These people have had power delegated to them, but it is simply the power to turn up and feed back to the real decision makers.

You will notice:

• Meeting delegation increases as project time passes.
• Few will admit to being impotent in the decisions that need to be taken.
• If these proxies do offer a decision, it is at risk of being overturned by their seniors later.
• Regardless of interest and engagement, senior stakeholder often have no choice but to send others.

Therefore it is vital to make sure you know how individual stakeholder decisions will be made. Especially when it is an important decision, make sure you are talking to the organ grinders!

What can you do now to increase the power of your project so you can regain control, and keep it?