Seems like everyone is talking about project communication and the soft skills of project management. One of the things that attracts me to the PM practice is the all-encompassing nature of it. To be effective, one has to understands projects, yes, but also general business, one’s own industry, contract norms, people management, financials, etc.
And you better be pretty darned good at communication.
And that goes double for a Cottage PM environment where the formalities for project selection and project charters and scope statements and such may not exist.
The Story
Here’s my story from today to back this up.
I work in an Operations group. We provide some process support, customer support, project support, and technical development for certain business and services units. We’re a Cottage PM shop. That is, we do a lot of projects without the rigor of any PM standards or norms. We have really talented, go-getter people, and we get some amazing work done. But as our success and responsibilities grow — yeah, those go together — we sometimes get bit in the behind from some of that lack of project formality. Like you, we have to figure out how to scale the big-PM thought that dominates PM literature, training, and certification down to a functional level for our environment.
So what’s up with communication today (the literal today, not the figurative today)? The principle is this: you gotta make sure that your sponsors / leadership / stakeholders understand properly the level of work involved in the projects. When you have a standing Operations team like ours who own most of these projects, it’s easy to forget that resourcing is still just as real a challenge as if you were hiring out for resources.
The Problem
Today, a colleague and I were visiting about a communication challenge. As in most project environments, including Cottage PM environments, there are many more desired projects than we have resources to work. Prioritization is a constant challenge. My colleague was lamenting that leadership was wanting two major projects by the end of the month. One had been prioritized above the other because it involved a hard date for customer announcement. The other is still wanted. What came to light in recent conversations, though, was that the business leadership had through that we were working only on that 2nd project. Leadership was apparently unaware of the technical work that had to be done — and was being done agressivley by a virtual team of at least 3 people — for first, higher priority project.
We had shifted our priorities to match the shifting business priorities with such efficacy that the leadership didn’t even know it.
On the one hand, that’s awesome agility! On the other hand, communication didn’t accompany the change. The impact of that shift was not called out, wasn’t known, and as a result, expectations didn’t shift with that shift in priority, and now there’s a problem.
As project managers, we have the functional need and the ethical duty to be sure that those expectations shift, too. Duty? Yes, duty. And not just because of expectations. It’s because the organization leadership really needs to understand how its limited resources are deployed and to have the freedom to exercise its own ethical duty to allocate those resources to the benefit of the organization.
Now What?
As my colleague and I talked, I discussed with him the use of a WBS as a means to do that communication. The WBS exists for these projects in one form or another (remember, we’re a Cottage PM environment in which there is no particular standard or practice for such things). But the WBS is not usually in a form that can paint a picture for leadership. And it should be. It’s a critical communication tool, not just a planning and control tool. So my colleague and I identified 3 things to address this problem:
- First, he’s going be diligent about a written Charter/Scope document to define the project and its borders at the beginning of the project before work begins. (Our organization won’t support the oft-touted rigid processes of written and signed Charters followed by Preliminary Scope Statements, then Scope Statement, then who knows the heck what, so this combined Charter/Scope idea is probably and appropriate scaling of those processes for our environement. We’ll see how it goes.)
- Second, we’ll explore using pictorial WBS geared toward communication. To do that, we’ll leverage some of the really good, straightforward recommendations from Josh Nankivel’s WBS Coach package.
- Third, we’ll be more diligent about project closure where we sit down with the leadership, pull out that Charter/Scope doc, and prove the results.
If you look at it, it doesn’t really add that much work. That work is already happening. But it happens so informally that memory shifts, priorities shift, crisis takes over, but things only ever get added to the plate; nothing very really gets prioritized off the plate.
It’s important to note that there are both self-serving elements at play and altruistic elements at play. And that’s OK. Just don’t let the self-serving aspect overtake the altruistic. It’s your job to keep them aligned and heading the same direction. I remember a college history class that discussed the idea of “enlighted self-interest,” and that’s probably what we’re talking about here.
I’ll write again about that self-interest gone amuck in a little while. Got a good story on that one, too.
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