Project Management for Mere Mortals by Claudia Baca

Author:Claudia Baca [Baca, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Project Management
ISBN: 9780132704656
Google: ySOCRudEyFgC
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2007-06-25T00:32:07.084550+00:00

You have completed your communication planning. Now you are ready to move into the “Teaming” section to talk about communication planning and how it will work with your team.

Teaming

I once worked on a project that replaced an old major computing system with a new Web-based system. I was not familiar with the content of the computer system, so I relied heavily on one subject matter expert, Pat, to advise me on the functionality we were replacing. Pat was a crusty curmudgeon of a person. No one liked working with him because he didn’t like anything—yes, anything. He disagreed with the project approach, and he disagreed with the new system. He didn’t like his team members. I could go on for days on what he didn’t like. Yet the users of the new system respected him and knew he would watch out for their best interests. Of course, they had to get past his negativity before they could hear what he was really saying. How do you manage the perceptions of your project when you are dealing with a team member like this? You can use a couple techniques to combat this type of negativity and still manage the perceptions about the project. In fact, these are good practices to put into place for managing the team’s communication altogether.

• Set the right expectations—To manage the perceptions about your project, you need to go back to the team norms again in order to set the proper expectations. You had the following team norms:

1. If a person has a problem with me, they will come to me first before talking about the problem with someone else.

2. If you apply that same concept of “tell me before you tell others” to project status and issues, you could have a second team norm.

If you have something negative to say about the project, you will tell the project manager before you tell anyone else.

Establish these norms and enforce; you’ll stand a better chance of disseminating consistent communication about your project. This norm also establishes the fact that you are willing to have the hard conversations with your team members about what they think is going wrong on the project. You might not be able to change their mind about what is wrong, but you will know what they are saying and will have a chance to proactively handle the negative information.

Besides, knowing what they think is going wrong also gives you the opportunity to capture these items as issues and work them, or, if appropriate, capture these items as risks so you can proactively handle the possible risk. I talk more about risks in the next chapter.

• Look for influencers, champions, and challengers—Just as you looked for influencers, champions, and challengers across the roles and people affected by the project, you’ll do the same with your own team. Do you have one course developer who is really the leader for the other course developers? If so, you might want to spend extra time with this person to make sure he or she is on board and will bring along the rest of the course developers.

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