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.

You need a meeting scheduled with a short notice. You are dealing with project team members on campus, different locations, and remote team members in different time zones. Sounds like fun.

Make a checklist of who needs to attend this meeting and who is an optional nice to have if they can attended.

Start selecting all the players for the meeting on the calendaring software that your company uses so you can see the date / times that they are available. Indicate required attendee or optional attendee. You will see a lot of meeting conflict dates and times because this is a short notice meeting. Just press on with the best date / time to schedule your meeting.

Select an appropriate meeting subject name to express the urgency of the short notice meeting. Give a brief summary of the reason for the meeting. Create an agenda and attach it to the meeting invite. Provide the conference call number for team members that will not be able to attend the meeting in person.

I call this the take no prisoners approach to scheduling a short notice meeting. If you try to accommodate everyone, it will not happen. The clock is ticking and you need answers and resolutions to issues. Explain to your Sponsors and Stakeholders that you are dead in the water because you can't schedule a meeting. People will juggle their schedules when you make an urgent compelling reason for the meeting.

That's why you are the Project Manager. Your job is to make things happen.