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.

Project Management should be transparent for Stakeholders to have a good insight on the progress. That will put some pressure on the Project Manager. Project Managers do provide periodic reporting, but is that enough? Go a step further and provide Stakeholders with the ability to have access to real time status that they can get on their smartphones or laptops. Select a Project Management Software that will provide mobile access. 

A Project Manager should welcome transparency. Transparency will demonstrate a confident Project Manager that is leading a team that will deliver results to their Stakeholders.

Transparency will get your Stakeholders engaged in the project by having real time updates on the progress. Good and bad news will be known now and not on a periodic status report.

(Note - this article was originally written by Drake Settsu and published on DrakeSettsu.BlogSpot.com in October 2016)

Your child is going to Kindergarten, you are going to leave your child’s education and care in the hands of a professional that has a goal to reach at the end of the school year. Prepare the children for 1st Grade. The teacher will be in charge of twenty children ages 5 to 6. With that many kids some ground rules need to be set so that everyone in the class knows the expectations.

The teacher gives the parents and children a tour of the classroom and playground to familiarise them and presents the class rules.

The Project Kickoff meeting is when you assemble all your team members with stakeholders in attendance watching you layout how you are going to run the project. Think of the stakeholders as parents that want the project team members to succeed.

The project manager presents the project to the team showing the project timeline and tasks assigned to the team. The expectations of the project manager is conveyed to the team that a weekly status meeting will be held on Fridays. Be prepared to report your status and if you cannot attend make an effort to email your status report by 5pm. I’m keeping it simple to illustrate the point I’m making on what team members are responsible for.

Whether you are teaching Kindergarten or running a project you need to set the ground rules and expectations from the beginning and develop and refine it along the way. Setting up expectations and ground rules will avoid any assumptions and make everyone’s job easier by knowing what is expected of you.

(Note - this article was originally written by Drake Settsu and published on DrakeSettsu.BlogSpot.com in May 2015)