1 SET THE VISION
It is always easier to inspire your team about the lofty project objectives when the work is only just beginning (although obviously it depends on the project). However, you need to ensure their commitment for the long term, which means they do have to think about the future. The messages you offer at the outset will set the tone for the subsequent reinforcement of those messages throughout the project’s life cycle.
Commitment and belief in the project’s objectives by the wider team are seen by some project leaders as ‘nice to have’ extras, but you will find it a lot easier and more pleasant to work with a team who understand the project’s vision and are prepared to work to achieve it. With that in mind, start as you mean to go on and aim to inspire the team from the outset and throughout the project.
WORK COLLABORATIVELY TO SET THE VISION
‘I was recently made responsible for a large regulatory project in the financial services industry,’ says Susanne Madsen, author of The Project Management Coaching Workbook, and herself a coach. The aim of the project was to build a centralised IT system which collates and sends information about over one million transactions a day to the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
Setting the vision for this project was a collaborative affair. ‘I interviewed several individuals including the sponsor,’ she says. ‘I asked them what they ultimately wanted to achieve with the project, not only about how they wanted the new IT system to behave in the short term, but which user groups, product types, functions and geographical regions they wanted the system to cover five years down the line.’ Susanne’s conversations with her project stakeholders also included finding out about the benefits they wanted to achieve and how these could be measured. ‘The project vision which we arrived at was to build a fully configurable system which could handle any type of financial product and any type of regulatory reporting requirements from any regulator across the globe. The vision is furthermore that the system will handle up to five million transactions a day and that rigorous data controls will help the company to save money on execution costs and manual interventions.’
Susanne has also worked on projects where the stakeholders were not so aligned about the project vision. ‘I worked on a large financial project where the project sponsor and the primary user disagreed to what the vision was,’ she says. ‘The sponsor wanted the project to primarily generate cost savings for the department whereas the user representatives wanted the project to generate better working practices and controls. In spite of several workshops these two stakeholder groups agreed to disagree and never fully reconciled their views. In the end the project sponsor won the battle simply because she was in control of the budget. Project funding was cut and the project was closed down as soon as the desired cost savings had been realised.’
Getting key decision makers to agree on common vision is one thing, but getting the project team and the wider stakeholder community to believe in it is something different. ‘I like to incorporate the project vision into the key project artefacts right from the start of the project,’ Susanne explains. ‘That means that I will describe the vision in the Project Charter or Project Initiation Document. On my latest project I also created a presentation with the sole purpose of describing the project vision, purpose and approach so that we could better communicate the vision to the wider stakeholder group and gain their buy-in. Every couple of months when we gave the presentation to someone new we would check with the sponsor to ensure that the vision was still accurate and update all relevant artefacts accordingly.’
Susanne believes that the best way to get the project team to believe in the project vision is to involve them in the project and expose them to the key stakeholders from day one. ‘When they are involved they feel that they have a stake in the project and they will be more driven and motivated to achieving and contributing to the vision,’ she explains. ‘For this reason I often invite team members to attend stakeholder workshops and I also encourage direct contact between a team member and an end user or stakeholder when the circumstances are right.’
In the early days of your project you will probably find your team hugely committed to achieving the objectives. But there’s a risk this will wane as soon as their day jobs start to take precedence over project tasks. Realisation that the work cannot be completed instantaneously will quickly set in. As the project manager, you have the responsibility of keeping your team focused on and dedicated to the job in hand. This is a task made more challenging by the fact that some of your team may not have chosen to work on the project willingly and are just doing what they have been told. Making them believe in the long-term success of the project is the secret to ensuring a good working relationship with your team, and in achieving your end goal. Do this through a clear project vision.
It is not always easy to create a clear vision for the future, especially if your project sponsor refuses to think about the long-term goals. A project may have very different objectives for the coming year and the coming five years. Keep digging and take every opportunity to press the senior stakeholders on what their long-term vision is for this project so that you can incorporate this into the project communications.
Take time to explain the goals of the project: do not assume that because their boss has allocated them to the work that he or she has also explained the ultimate objectives. You know why the project is important, so translate that into reasons why it is important for the people working on it. Put the project into the context of the company’s overall strategy so individuals can see the link to the bigger picture. Will it make their daily lives easier? Help make training new staff simpler? Will it reduce customer complaints? Or generate more sales?
One discussion at the start of a project may not be enough to keep the commitment level high, especially when the project hits difficulties or is perceived to be taking a long time – or if key stakeholders don’t agree on the vision and you are dealing with conflicting views. This can negatively impact on the project team’s morale and the progress of the project, so try to tackle this conflict by asking questions and facilitating a discussion until you reach agreement on one, solid, vision for the project.
Enlist the help of your project sponsor when it comes to setting and reinforcing the vision. If the main stakeholder or project sponsor attends a meeting, invite them to comment on how the project work will help achieve the vision. Support from senior managers is a good way to practically demonstrate corporate commitment to the project. The team will be more committed to the project themselves if they feel that their work is being recognised and supported from those higher up. Get the sponsor to drop an email to the team thanking them for their achievements so far and reinforcing the end objectives. Better still, ask the sponsor to mention your project in his next company briefing so the message that your project is important reaches a wider audience. Support from senior management is the second most critical factor in project success, after having clear goals and objectives.54 If you can’t reach into the upper echelons of the company, ask business users who are already starting to see benefits to attend a project meeting and explain the difference the project was made to them.
Equally, you can keep reminding your stakeholders and project sponsor about the vision by linking the project plan and deliverables back to the vision whenever you share project information with them.
Try to create a culture of commitment and belief in the project’s vision at the outset at all levels, and continually reinforce this throughout the life cycle of the project.