11
Creating Internal and External Communications with the Sponsor
YOUR SPONSOR CAN be a valuable resource when it comes to communicating internally and externally. However, you must prepare a game plan for best utilizing the sponsor. In Chapter 9, I discussed the use of authority to influence people, and that is the lever you will want to apply for various communications.
Conflict and Communications
During a project, it is normal to find yourself in a conflict situation. You may find yourself in a conflict situation for a lot of reasons, such as:
Some people try to get what they believe to be their needs met in nonproductive and indirect ways.
Others do not recognize or understand what they are really struggling with relative to the project.
You can deal with conflict in several ways:
View the conflict as a competition that leads to you and the other person trying to win.
Avoid the conflict in a variety of ways such as concession, but that usually does not end well for the project.
Collaborate with the other person in an attempt to find a solution that you can live with and that the other person can agree to so the project can move on.
In any case, you need to have a conversation with your sponsor on how to best handle the conflict. In my experience, most people start with a position of competition where they want to win.
Conflict, when taught in terms of conflict resolution, is commonly defined as “when two or more parties perceive that they have incompatible goals and therefore seek to undermine each other’s goal-seeking capability.”
Professor Lorelei Ortiz, PhD
A real key to resolving conflict is listening carefully. That may seem counterintuitive because our first reaction is to prepare our arguments and get ready to go into battle. However, over my years of working in projects, I have noticed that the root of the conflict is often that each party is actually seeing the problem differently. Normally, each side is describing a symptom they either see or expect. So listening carefully will help you uncover the issues as the other side perceives them. From there, the next step is to focus the adversaries—and you may be one of them—on finding a common solution for the problem/issue.
Let me give you an example from my own experience. The project I was asked to deliver was to build a Project Management Office (PMO) for a global oil field services company. The PMO would support and coordinate new product development across multiple service lines with a goal of reducing the amount of time from concept to market. My sponsor for the project was the senior vice president of technology. As we began to work on pulling together the PMO, my sponsor began to get serious resistance from the president of one of the most profitable divisions. This president was a key stakeholder, and if he waivered or refused to support the PMO, it would fail.
My sponsor and I arranged a meeting with the president to explain what we were doing and how it would improve time-to-market for his division. That was our first mistake. I immediately saw the resistance that my sponsor had seen. The president began to talk, at length, about how he held his people accountable, and he did not need this Project Management Office.
This back-and-forth went on for 20 minutes or so, and I realized we were not going to sway him. This was a very senior person who was rarely challenged except by the CEO. So rather than continuing a strategy of trying to convince him, I decided to switch gears and began to ask him questions. I really listened and worked to understand where his objections were coming from. Soon we uncovered the real issue in his mind.
When he heard this initiative would be the “Project Management Office,” his mind focused on the word management. His interpretation of the office was that our project would create a group that was responsible for building technology that was outside his span of control within the corporate hierarchy. He had confused the word management in the title with line management, and he would never agree to that.
Once my sponsor and I understood his need (control and accountability), then we could frame what the PMO was very differently. In fact, we completely abandoned the title (PMO) altogether because we were concerned that other senior management had the same objection, and we just had not heard them say so yet. And to make it clearly fit into my sponsor’s span of control, we ended up renaming the group as Technology Support Services. It really did all the same functions as you might see in a PMO, but the labeling diffused the concerns of the division president, and we were able to successfully complete the project.
Figure 11.1: Dimensions + Behaviors of Conflict
Most of the time, the sponsor will ask you to collaborate with the other person to solve the problem. However, while that is the ideal approach, you may need your sponsor to intervene with others in order to motivate them to take a collaborative view.
See Figure 11.1. As you can guess, the real place to aim is in the upper right-hand quadrant.
Four Emotional Skills to Develop
In order to effectively handle conflict during your project, you have to develop four skills. These four skills will serve you well because sometimes the conflict will be with your sponsor and other times you will need to work with your sponsor to solve problems.
First, you must learn to not take the conflict personally. I recognize this is hard inasmuch as, even after many years, this is something I still need to work on. Let’s face it, often our projects become our baby, and no one appreciates when someone else tells them that their baby is ugly! However, we need to go back to the beginning and recognize that a project was really sanctioned to improve the performance of a business. When you feel yourself starting to get angry, take a walk and tell yourself that the perceived attack is not personal—just business.
Second, don’t make assumptions. In the story I just related, I had made an assumption that the division president knew what a PMO was! Always challenge yourself about assumptions you might be making. A good test might be to ask yourself, “If I walked up to someone in another setting, would they understand what I am talking about?” The assessment of the answer you are likely to get will help you recognize the assumptions you are making.
The third skill is called listening with a third ear. What that essentially means is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and guess what they would understand about your priorities.
Finally, develop the skill of being open-minded about solutions. Others will respect you, work with you more openly, and will see you as rational and reasonable.
Approaching the situation with integrity and in the spirit of resolving the problem goes a long way to solving any conflict.
Presentations to Stakeholders
In making a presentation to stakeholders, the process basically comes down to two parts:
2. Delivery
In preparing for a presentation, the first step is determining the purpose of your presentation.
The way you organize the information will depend on your purpose, so make sure you clearly determine your purpose.
Four basic objectives describe the purpose for any presentation:
1.Advocating: Convincing or selling a point or approach to the audience
2.Instruction: Informing or teaching your target audience something about your project
3.Inspiration: Motivating your audience to act on something related to the project
4.Stimulation: Stimulating debate or discussion among the stakeholders
So let’s take a look at these basic objectives and see how they might apply to a project.
1.Advocating: For some of my projects, I have been asked to present to the sales managers and give them an overview of the project so that they can understand why the company is moving in this direction. Here I am selling an idea to a target stakeholder group that needs to understand the benefits of a project. In this scenario, I have to be cognizent that this group sells all the time and that they may be highly critical of my objective, so I must plan carefully. I will also use a technique called preselling as part of my strategy. In preselling, I am preparing the presentation and then reviewing my content with a person I feel is friendly toward the project so that I can get his feedback.
2.Instruction: Other times, I have been asked to give an overview of the project to the executive committee of the company so they can understand what the project is all about. I would probably choose instruction as my basic purpose because I want them to know the schedule and the business outcomes of the project at a bare minimum. However, I might also cover the Business Case for the project and the overall goals. Here, we want input from the sponsor and ask that she presells the presentation to someone who will give us feedback in a highly charged political environment.
3.Inspiration: In other situations, I have been asked to brief management in order to make sure they will provide the support that will be critical for the project’s success. In this case, I would choose inspiration as my basic purpose. I want to motivate them to assist me in getting the entire organization behind the project because I am concerned that I will meet stiff resistance at times. Providing information that convinces the management team to back me with their departments will be the key to a successful presentation. Remember, these are the people who supervise those who actually do the work!
4.Stimulation: In this case, I might need to make a presentation to a working group to get them to consider possible alternatives for the Working Committee. In these situations, the Working Committee simply does not have time to dig deeply into this subject. Obviously, the presentation needs to stimulate discussion and get them involved in the solution so that the final result comes from the people who know the business, not as a dictate from the project team.
Remember, if you don’t know what you have in mind, how is the stakeholder group supposed to figure it out?
For me, the easiest way to determine my purpose is to answer this simple sentence:
“The purpose of my presentation is . . .” Please believe me when I tell you that if you cannot answer that question, your audience will not be able to either.
Next, I want to review the stakeholder analysis I did earlier in chapter 6. I might include some of the following questions:
Who are the key people who will attend and influence the others?
What do they already know about the project?
Do I know their attitude about my project?
Do I have the right credibility to speak to this audience, or do I need to bring someone along with me who has more or better credibility?
What concerns or questions will they want addressed or answered during the presentation?
How do they receive information? For example, do they prefer a lot of facts and data, or will they be more interested in how it will affect them?
Do I know enough about this group’s level of commitment?
Who is likely to dislike my ideas or information and what will they dislike about it?
Who loses power or access to power if my project is implemented successfully?
The answers to these questions are critical to being properly prepared to present to any stakeholder group. To help answer the questions and to make sure you do a sanity check, I would encourage you to get your sponsor to tell you how they will respond and react to your information. Your sponsor is on your side but will also provide you with the unvarnished truth.
Strategy
The other critical success factor in pulling together a successful presentation is to choose a strategy that will match the audience and the purpose you are trying to achieve. If you watch any of the many shows on television about the legal profession, you will often hear the judge say to one of the lawyers, “Where are you going with this, counselor?” Too often listeners are left with the same problem. They are having trouble following the logic of the speaker, and it frustrates them. So what can you do? The best solution is to use one of some common strategies:
Chronological (time sequence)
Big picture/little picture
Problem/solution
Question/answer
Most critical to least critical (particularly if you may run out of time before you can finish)
In many of my presentations, I know that the audience will have questions and that a question/answer strategy would fit. I decide that I will address their concerns head-on and give them the confidence that my project will fill their demands and more. However, I may also review the content of my presentation using a problem/solution strategy or a big picture/small picture strategy. Then I might confer with my sponsor to sound him out on the strategy.
The final three thoughts about strategy are these:
1.Keep it simple: This does not mean to talk down to the stakeholders, but remember, they cannot “go back over it” if they miss the point, as they can when they are reading. So keeping the information simple and practical helps to ensure someone does not get lost along the way.
2.Keep it in perspective: That is their perspective. Always look at what you are saying from the perspective of the stakeholders you are talking to by referring back to your stakeholder analysis.
3.Use handouts carefully: I usually recommend providing handouts at the end of the presentation. That way, people are not shuffling through the pages and not paying any attention as you speak. However, that is not always practical or possible. Essentially, use the stakeholder analysis to determine when to use handouts and how much additional detail they will need to contain.
Build It in Three Parts
The classic format for presentations suggests dividing a presentation into three distinct parts: the introduction, the body and the conclusion. Here is a brief outline of each:
Introduction: In the introduction, you establish your purpose, cover the benefits people will receive by listening to you, and provide them with a road-map or quick listing of the topics you will discuss so that your listeners can follow along.
Body: This follows the strategy you decided earlier and contains anywhere between three to five main points, along with supporting information. It may seem odd to limit the body to only three to five main points, but research has clearly shown that this number comprises the limits of what most people can comprehend while listening. If you want to think about it in some context, think about the last time you went to a social gathering and met a number of new people. How many names did you remember? Most of us would remember only a few. As you finish the main points of the body and before you move to the conclusion, ask for questions.
Conclusion: After you finish answering any questions, notify your audience that you are finishing. Start by recapping your purpose, the main points, and the benefits that you covered during the presentation. Finally, do not forget to thank them for their time and cooperation with the project.
Points to Remember
Understand the role of conflict and your communications with the sponsor.
Work to develop the four emotional skills required.
Prepare well for any presentation.
Have a clear purpose and strategy.
Build the presentation in three distinct parts.
