Project Management in Real Life

The big day is here to present a proposed project to stakeholders. You prepared a slideshow to provide visual aids so you make a clear presentation. Looks like you are well prepared for this presentation.

I have been to two presentations that blew up with displeased stakeholders. 

Presentation of a proposed cell phone tower in a residential community. It was presented at a neighborhood board meeting. The Project Coordinator started the slideshow and fielded questions that could not be answered. The Project Coordinator started to get nervous and stopped the slideshow and kept dodging all questions from the angry stakeholders. The chairman of the board had to jump in to address the Project Coordinator, he said can you provide the answers? He could not. The presentation was a failure. The Project Coordinator was not sincere to say I will get back to you on that question and just kept on presenting without being able to answer any questions.

Presentation of a proposed major neighborhood road work improvement project at a community town hall meeting. This presentation was slick and well prepared, but it ended in the community disapproving of it. The Project Managers did not crack under fire from the community. They kept their composure. Why did their presentation fail? They did not do a good job collecting traffic data and community input for the presentation. I call the examples they gave cherry picking and the community knew that they were cherry picking. 

Lessons to be learned from the two failed presentations.

1) Have subject matter experts available to help you field questions that you cannot properly answer. You need to anticipate the questions of the stakeholders in advance so you need to be well prepared. It's just common sense.

2) You think you have a polished presentation that will wow the stakeholders. Make sure you have accurate data to support your presentation.

Present your solutions with the three options approach. When you are on a budget and faced with a problem that needs to be addressed you need to look at various options to address the problem. 

1) Look at the short term cheap fix solution if it will meet your needs until a long term solution is implemented in the future. 

2) When you are uncertain when a long term fix will be implemented you need to look for a solution that has the capability of going the distance without all those bells and whistles. 

3) The long term solution with all the bells and whistles that will address all your needs into the future. 

It's all in how you present the options to management. You need to upfront commit to your first pick and hard sell it. Management will have a chance to see the three options and decide to just fork out the money to address a permanent fix or select one of the two cheaper solutions to buy time to get that permanent solution in the budget.

(Note - this article was originally written by Drake Settsu and published on DrakeSettsu.BlogSpot.com in April 2014)