CHAPTER 18
Communication and Beyond

Effective communication in new development projects is important, and it is made slightly easier because of the fact that the project is delivering a tangible product. Maintenance, on the other hand, delivers an intangible service, which makes effective communication even more important. The customer of a project wants to know the project status and to be assured that the delivery dates are met at the agreed-upon cost. But customers of maintenance want more. They want:

•   Assurances that production systems are stable and available for business purposes

•   Assurances that the maintenance team is diligently working on a problem if it is not resolved immediately

•   Assurances that Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics are being met

•   Statuses that reflect that approved enhancements are being worked

When the business customer trusts the maintenance team, the customer will start to demand less frequent updates. But if there is no trust, the customer will constantly want to know the status to ensure that the maintenance team is being “managed.” This is one of the stresses of maintenance and should motivate us to constantly improve trust levels. The only way to do so is through building relationships with all the business players by delivering results and communicating the results effectively. Establishing effective communication with the stakeholders and consistently delivering on business needs are the keys to building relationships based on trust. The sooner this happens, the sooner the stress level of your team members will decrease.

Developing a Communications Plan

If you don’t plan your communications, you will never communicate appropriately or frequently enough to all the right people about all the right subjects. A project has many stakeholders; some are obvious, like your boss who wants status weekly, and some are not so obvious, like the end user of your system. Developing a plan identifying who you will communicate to, what you will communicate, and how frequently you will communicate is a good start. You can eliminate misunderstandings and reap many other rewards by frequently communicating—in multiple venues and at multiple levels. Figure 18-1 is a sample communication plan.

To develop a communication plan like the one shown in Figure 18-1, start by conducting a stakeholder analysis to identify the key stakeholders and the messages they require. Utilize your team members or other knowledgeable resources to help brainstorm a better list than you can develop yourself. To conduct the stakeholder analysis, answer the following questions:

1.   Who owns the systems?

2.   Who funds maintenance?

3.   Who provides inputs to maintenance?

4.   Who receives the benefits or suffers the consequences?

5.   Who are the decision makers?

•   Business unit upper management

•   Business unit managers

•   Business unit employees

•   IT upper management

•   IT managers (peers)

•   IT team members

6.   What categories of stakeholder groups are there?

•   Users

•   Business leaders

•   IT organizations

•   IT team

Figure 18-1: Communication Plan

After creating a separate column for each group, determine the items that should be communicated. Create a separate row for each type of communication.

Remember, listening is the other half of communication. Communication is a two-way endeavor; also determine what information you need from each of these stakeholder groups. At this point, go back and add to the communication venues column information you need from each group. The last row in Figure 18-1 is an example of needed information.

Lastly, determine the frequency of the communication. Capture this at each intersection of the stakeholder group and communication venue.

System Owners

The owners of the systems that your team maintains are key stakeholders. The business that reaps the benefits from the system and ultimately knows how the systems support its business needs should actually own the system. Issues are confused when IT acts as the owner.

Enhancements to the systems should happen only if the business wants the change. But using the term “the business” can be confusing. Users can request (or demand) changes, but are they the ones with the authority to make such a request?

You and everyone in the business need to know who owns each system. One department head may own the entire system, or departments may each own a subsystem. Figure 18-2 provides a simple Owners Matrix to track the owners and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for each system, interface, or report.

The Business Owner has the decision rights to approve enhancement work, test results, and authorize migrations. The maintenance manager who knows who makes the decisions can refer questions from non-owners of how to proceed on sensitive issues to the owner. The SMEs are the people who can answer detailed questions about business processes related to the system (and are great candidates for performing system tests).

Figure 18-2: Owners Matrix

Politics—Beyond the Communication Plan

To further help the success of our maintenance effort, we can go beyond our Communication Plan by creating a Political Analysis and Political Action Plan. Did the word “political” strike you as odd in the previous sentence? Perhaps you’ve experienced the negative side of “office politics,” but please read on, because here we are going to provide a different slant on the topic.

You, as a manager of a project or maintenance, must be politically savvy. The value of assessing the political dimension of the people in your Communication Plan is threefold. First, by understanding people’s motivations, you will be able to find ways to influence them in ways that help you achieve your goals. Second, their motivations will help you predict how they will react to new information. Third, uncovering their not-so-obvious motivations relating to priorities can enlighten you about the company’s business needs, which in turn will enable you to craft solutions that address the greater good of the whole company.

Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said, “You can have anything that you want as long as you help enough other people get what they want.” This is the fundamental principle of having a job. You help your company get what it wants, and it pays you so you can purchase what you want.

One of American Heritage College Dictionary’s (2002) definitions of politics is, “Using or marked by prudence, expedience, and shrewdness; artful.” Consider the following working definition of politics: Politics is the method of relating to and building relationships with others to help their interests and your interests. This definition is in synch with Ziglar’s quote and places a positive light on the subject.

So why involve yourself with politics? Possible answers include:

•   Being politically savvy is an effective risk mitigation tool for your maintenance effort. Effective use of the techniques in this chapter will help the success of your maintenance team, which in turn will be beneficial to you and your customers.

•   Organizational conflict always exists because of scarce resources (people, time, and money). Your organization is made up of people with different interests working together for a common good. Others will have some level of say in who is freed up to work on your team. We all want the best people, but we can’t all get them. We need to be politically savvy to obtain the best resources we can.

•   Objectives that we must meet are scope, schedule, cost, and customer satisfaction. Sometimes customer satisfaction is overlooked. The end-users will have an influence on the perceived success of your team. Production changes can be viewed negatively if they are made suddenly, without involving the users before deployment. Understanding the user’s need for information is important.

•   Ultimately, business processes are more about people than machines. The computer systems that we focus on are there only to support the people—who should be the real focus of managers. All managers need to build relationships with people, and that is what politics is about.

Because of scarce resources and different business interests among members of the same company, conflict is unavoidable. Politics is the means of resolving such conflict. It is naïve to think that conflict must be eliminated for a company to work effectively. Maintenance teams are particularly vulnerable to conflict because the customer and other IT development groups don’t necessarily understand the full value of the service the maintenance team provides. Your political savvy will help determine your success in running the maintenance team effectively and using your relationships with people to increase their perception of your team’s value to the company.

Politics—The Three Choices

Many have portrayed people displaying the aggressive, overtly political behavior as Sharks. These sea creatures roam large territories attacking and devouring for their self-interest with no conscience, only cold gray eyes. This may be the stereotype of political players, but it is not the only one available. Ouellette & Associates Consulting, Inc., has added two additional sea animals to the analogy to portray other political behaviors. These are the Flounder and the Dolphin (see Figure 18-3).

If politics is a game, then the Flounder is the person who doesn’t want to play. In the sea, a flounder is an unusual flat fish that just stays put on the sand, tries to blend in, and attempts to avoid trouble, such as being eaten. Flounder employees have the naïve view that if they ignore politics, everything will be all right. They become victims in many cases, which just reinforces their belief that politics is bad.

Neither one of these two approaches may suit you, so there is a third option—the Dolphin. Dolphins are fun-loving animals. They swim great distances, playfully interact with each other, and come up for air. They are also known for their ability to challenge sharks; they will not back down to a shark.

Figure 18-3 highlights the differences between our three choices in politics.

In many ways, Sharks and Dolphins exhibit many similar characteristics. They are both knowledgeable of the political field, and they both know the tactics and techniques.

A Dolphin manager will likely do the following in the workplace:

•   Build relationships; break down barriers.

•   Meet with people one-on-one and address objections.

•   Use active listening skills to focus on a person’s needs and feelings.

•   Understand that most important decisions are made before a meeting takes place.

•   Help fulfill the customer’s WIIFM (What’s In It For Me).

•   Promote the team’s successes promptly.

•   Not surprise the customer.

•   Not hide bad news (From Ouellette & Associates Consulting, Inc., “Bad news doesn’t age like fine wine—it ages like fish”).

•   Not fight the wrong battles.

•   Not try to be “right” but to be successful.

•   Never argue with a customer or supervisor.

•   Not afraid of the Sharks.

Figure 18-3: Three Approaches to IT Politics

© 2006 Oullette & Associates Consulting, Inc. Adapted with permission.

Floundering at a Program Meeting

Let me share a personal story about being a floundering project manager. This story is the reason I started my quest to figure out how office politics works. The scene was our weekly program meeting, where the IT project managers and directors met with the business functional area counterparts to discuss the multiple projects under the overarching program. The meeting was led by the business’s vice president, who stated that this was a working meeting.

Several deployments of separate systems were scheduled as part of this program. The first one was starting to run late, and I began my report by asking what business impact there would be if the first deployment completed two weeks late. This delay seemed harmless to me, because I knew that it would not affect the other deployments. I thought this was an appropriate time to raise this issue since the vice president did state that the meeting was a working meeting.

The alarm bells went off in my head when the vice president started by saying, “I am not trying to win the bitch-of-the-month award, but. . . ” There were more words that followed, but she basically took exception to the delay so early in the program.

It took me a while to figure out what I did wrong: I didn’t act like a Dolphin.

1.   I surprised the customer.

2.   I didn’t raise the issue to the customer in private.

3.   I didn’t consider that a delay would be bad for the customer’s WIIFM.

4.   I hid some minor bad news the week before.

There is nothing like learning the hard way. You take the test and the lesson follows. I share this story so that you, the wise reader, can learn from my mistakes.

Political Analysis

Balancing various demands between various stakeholders may come naturally to some people who can keep track of things in their heads. But for most of us, capturing key information on paper will help us organize the planning of specific tasks. The remainder of this section presents a method for conducting a Political Analysis, which goes well beyond standard communication plans and should be seen and used only by you, the manager. A Political Analysis contains sensitive information and reflects your viewpoint, which might not be shared by others. The next section will present action items to take to implement your success strategy.

Figure 18-4 provides a Political Analysis Template (or Players Log) for capturing people’s lower level needs. The intent of this analysis is to list the people with power to influence your team’s success and to categorize their motivations. Your analysis will be based on your knowledge and assumptions. Therefore, the analysis does not represent a steady-state reality; it represents only your opinion of that reality. You can also include the opinions of others, however.

Figure 18-4: Political Analysis *Confidential*

As you perform the following steps, you may find that you don’t know what to write for a given person. Leave that item blank. Blanks are your signal that you need to acquire more information as part of the planning process. As Kathleen Kelley Reardon put it in her book, The Secret Handshake, “You need to put yourself in a position to get important information. There are ways to get at least reasonably networked so that you aren’t always getting the news when it’s no longer new.”

1.  Players’ Names

The first step is to identify the players, starting with the stake-holders you already identified in your communication plan. Then broaden your view to include people that will or could be affected by your maintenance team. These could be other managers who will be competing to obtain the same team members you need or managers who feel threatened by your team’s successes. The focus should be on people who could have an impact on you and your team.

Include yourself on the log. Provide an honest assessment of yourself and compare how you stack up to the others you will be interacting with.

2.  Power Bases

What form of power do they assert? The American Heritage College Dictionary (2002) defines power as “a person, group, or nation having great influence or control over others.” People have greater or lesser amounts of power, but power is derived from different sources (bases). List one or more of the power bases for each player. Leave this field blank if you don’t know what power base the person has. Figure 18-5 lists power bases.

3.  Risk Tolerance

For each of the players, list the risk tolerance level that you assume he or she has: H (High), M (Medium), or L (Low). Base your judgment of the level on your observation of the player’s behaviors or the opinions of others whose judgment you trust.

Figure 18-5: Personal Power Bases

Power Base	Definition
Position	“The Boss,” someone who can reward or punish behavior. Also called legitimate power.
Expert	Person recognized as the subject matter expert.
Referent	Person others want to be with or be like. Possesses charisma.
Connection	Person with strong relationships with powerful people or many people.

4.  Priority

For each of the players, identify the player’s priorities. Possible priorities are scope, schedule, and cost; others are special interests in specific projects or initiatives.

5.  WIIFM

WIIFM stands for “What’s In It For ME?” One’s “agenda” is another term meaning the same thing. Everyone has self-interest, whether it is aligned with one’s company or not. Self-interest is the reason for financial incentive plans that realign self-interest with the company’s goals. Self-interest is a strong driver of behavior and can help predict how a person will respond to different situations. Reardon states, “If you don’t know what motivates someone’s behavior—and how to link the things he or she values to those that you need—you’ve no hope of influencing, managing, or changing the situation.”

On the log, write a few words describing the person’s self-interest (WIIFM).

6.  Relationship

Are these people for you or against you? The answer is based on your relationship with them. Rank the relationship as Good, Bad, or No Contact.

7.  Other

Leave one additional column for miscellaneous notes that you may want to include about a player.

Political Planning and Tactics

Now that you have a view of the political climate from your Political Analysis, you can start planning your actions. The objective is to respond as a Dolphin. Your intent should be to improve your success rate in developing effective relationships by looking for ways to take advantages of opportunities.

Figure 18-6 shows a simple Political Action Plan. Use it to capture the actions you have committed yourself to perform. Like the Political Analysis, this plan should not be shared with others.

What actions or tasks should you take? What could go wrong from a political perspective? Your plan will consist of the tasks you are committing to perform and when you intend to perform them. You make this commitment to yourself. Review your Political Analysis and determine which relationships need to be established or strengthened. Categories of tasks to consider include the following:

•   Seeking more information

Even though your Political Analysis may be finished, you need to realize that you will never have complete information about each player. Therefore, you need to always seek to learn new information about the players; you need to mount an ongoing intelligence-gathering operation similar to what government intelligence agencies do. List the questions that you have about the players in your Political Action Plan. Use the blank spaces in your analysis as a starting point for what information to go after.

•   Expanding and building relationships

Figure 18-6: Political Action Plan *Confidential*

What relationships do you want to work on first? Focus on individuals having the greatest impact on your team. Begin building relationships where you don’t already have one. Avoid fooling yourself into believing that meeting the same friends all the time over lunch is expanding your network. Although these relationships must be nurtured, you need to foster new ones as well.

•   Neutralizing “enemies”

For those you regard as “enemies,” look for some common interest that you can build a relationship on. The end result may not be a close relationship, but it could be a neutral one. In cases where you have “enemies” where you can’t develop a positive relationship, determine which of the people you have a good relationship with you can enlist to help you to neutralize the “enemies.” If necessary, get help from higher-level leaders in your organization.

•   Controlling the decision process

You can control more of the decision process than you may think by taking some simple steps. One step is for you to write meeting minutes and send them to the participants. Most people don’t like performing this task, but doing it can shift power to you by your being able to document key items in which you are interested. Another step is to take the lead by calling meetings on issues that will be decided and chairing them.

Implement Plan and Refine

Implement your plan! Perform the actions you identified and write down the results of those actions. Plans are useless unless they are used and modified. Follow through with your action items. As you talk to more people and learn more about players’ motivations, update your Political Analysis. Lastly, as you complete action items, you should refine your plan and add new action items.

Developing and continuously using the Political Analysis and the Political Action Plan takes a strong commitment. No one will remind you to do these tasks, so it will be easy to give up on this effort. However, the benefits of doing these tasks could propel your career. People that make things happen are the ones that are promoted to more responsible roles.