Project Conversations
by Dennis Stevens
Being good at performing projects is increasingly important in many companies. It is through projects that changes in technology, organizational structure, business models, and processes are made in the company. Additionally, the work that many companies deliver to their customers is performed through project management. You might manage your projects with a formal project management process, or use a more ad-hoc approach to managing the projects. More and more companies are recognizing the importance of project management and are working to improve their ability to manage projects. This can be through project management training, formalized project management processes, and standardized project documentation. However, even with trained project managers, project schedules, requirements documents, issue logs, and status reports, many companies struggle to successfully deliver projects.
Projects can be viewed as a network of understanding, coordinating, and committing conversations that take place through a social construct. This is a complicated definition and communicates a lot of information. Let’s take a careful look at the definition. First, a project is temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. A conversation is the use of language to exchange thoughts, ideas or information entered into with intent on the part of both parties to be changed in the process. So conversations serve a purpose. In projects the purposes involve establishing a better understanding, coordinating efforts and resources, and managing commitments. Finally, projects occur through the efforts and interaction of people on the project. When people work together toward a common end, it creates a social construct.
Based on this definition of projects, you can improve your ability to manage and perform projects by improving the conversations that take place in the project. What does improving conversations mean? It means making sure the right conversations are taking place at the best time, and that the purpose of the conversation is accomplished with the least effort and waste.
Sometimes project schedules, requirements documents, issue logs, and status reports serve the purpose of blaming or forcing accountability. In these projects, these tools try to serve as a substitute for having the conversations. In social constructs, knowledge arises through effective interaction. So these tools enable project conversations, not serve as substitutes for conversations.
This article outlines the 10 primary project conversations. These conversations fall into the three primary categories of Learning and Understanding, Coordinating, and Committing. The conversations are given names, the purpose of the conversation is described, and the impact that you will observe when this conversation isn’t happening effectively.
Learning and understanding conversations deal with conveying ideas and getting performers on the project operating from a shared understanding of the project.
1. Purpose: Projects are performed with a purpose in mind. It is important to communicate this purpose consistently to everyone on the project. The conversation for purpose is about having the stakeholders and project performers in addition to understanding the project purpose, align their purposes with the project. Paul Evans says that people don’t dislike change, they dislike being changed. When the conversation for purpose is not held with the people impacted by the project, they feel like the project is happening to them.
People don’t do their jobs for the best interest of the business. They do what they do for the best interest of themselves. Performers on the project typically have very different purposes than the project itself. These purposes may even go unexamined by the performer. Their purposes may involve implementing cool new technology, using the latest management fad, protecting their turf, or earning respect by being in charge of the project. These purposes are often considered undiscussable. So decisions are made throughout the project that serve the purposes of the performers and that might be at odds with the project or the organization.
2. Understanding: Conversations for understanding involve establishing common understanding. This often involves one person on the project learning something new from someone else on the project. Conversations for understanding are important between different functional groups, and when defining expected outcomes. The need for conversations for understanding comes from the complexity of social constructs and projects.
In domain complexity, where it is difficult for one person to see how another person will create a results. In social complexity, people have diverse opinions and perspectives. In dynamic complexity, cause and effect are separated by time and distance. In generative complexity, people may have vague or differing views of the future outcome. For example, requirements documents define what needs to be done on a project and to make it meaningful context is needed to enable understanding. The requirements documents by themselves are not adequate. The gap in understanding leaves room for the performer to build something that is not optimal either from a development or a requirement standpoint.
3. Creative Solutions: Problem solving is often considered to be eliminating something undesirable. This is often performed by a single person who does it from their perspective. It can result in constraints on the rest of the organization. On the other hand, a creative solution accomplishes an outcome that is in the best interest of everyone involved. This can only happen by involving other people in a conversation to explore possible outcomes. When during the process an unforeseen event or problem arises, there is a choice. One to eliminate the issue and move forward on the original plan. Or, reexamine all the new options presented by the current circumstances. Since these issues may require extra work, and maybe a change in direction, they actually present opportunities to create a better solution.
4. Competing Concerns: Based on the conversations for purpose, or resulting from complexity during a conversation for understanding, people may end up with competing concerns. A typical approach for managing competing concerns is to elevate the issue up through management and have management devise a compromise solution. A compromise solution means neither party will get the optimal outcome from there perspective. This is almost never in the best interest of the organization or the project outcome. A conversation for competing concerns involves identifying a shared result and exploring the assumptions behind each person’s perspective. In many cases, it is possible to invalidate an assumption and define a result that meets everyone’s best interest.
Coordination conversations involve aligning the performers and resources with the work to be performed.
5. Enrollment: Stakeholder’s and project performers may be more or less committed to a project. A conversation for enrollment serves two purposes. First to align the stakeholder or performer with the project. Secondly, to identify the actual level of commitment to the project. People will pay lip service to a project while actually having no intention to support the performance or implementation of the project. It is important for everyone to have clear agreement on the level of enrollment.
6. Flow: Moving work through a project team is at least as important in ad-hoc work as it is in a manufacturing process. When work piles up in a manufacturing process, it takes up space and slows down throughput. When work piles up in project and knowledge work, it spoils quickly. Not just the work itself, which may spoil because other decisions are made that cause the work to be irrelevant or incorrect. Work also spoils because of losing the freshness and perspective of the people who were working on it.
A conversation for flow involves coordinating hand-offs very tightly. Conversations for flow also involve identifying causes when work doesn’t flow, and putting into place changes to improve flow. When work is ready to be worked on, it should be handed off to someone to work on it as soon as possible. This reduces the work in process, allows the project team to capitalize on gains where work was completed in less time than estimated, and capitalizes on the freshness of the memory of the people performing the work.
7. Planning: A conversation for planning involves defining outcomes, dependencies, resources requirements, and estimated effort. It is very important that the conversation for planning is not confused with the conversation for promising. The planning conversation cannot be a conversation for commitment because of the uncertainty in estimates and learning that will take place during the project. There are multiple levels of planning conversation that can take place. It is important for everyone involved to have the same understanding of what the planning horizon is. When planning is confused with committing, performers will pad efforts due to the uncertainty inherit in planning. When performers pad efforts the tendency is for gains to be lost and losses accumulated. This results in a dramatic increase in the amount of time it takes to complete a project.
Committing – Committing conversations are about the actual promising, status, and delivery of the work. They are very different than coordinating conversations in that they do not involve estimating but are about specific intention. Hal Maccomber at Reforming Project Management has spent the last decade or so helping organizations improve their committing conversations.
8. Promising: A conversation for promising begins with negotiating between the requestor and the performer about the specific nature of the request. A promise isn’t made until the performer clearly understands the request has scheduled the time, has available resource and skills, and has all predecessors available. Slippery promising is one of the greatest costs to project performance.
9. Completion: A conversation for completion occurs when the performer tells the customer that the work is completed. The customer will then review the result of the work. This conversation is often overlooked. Work may or may not be completed on the date promised. When completion is ambiguous, the next performer may not know to get started, or the work result may be incomplete. This leads to a wasted time, miscommunication and rework.
10. Status: A conversation for status is necessary during the performance of work. It involves the performer communicating whether they are on track to keep the promise they made under the current conditions of satisfaction. It is equally important for the requestor to communicate if the there is a change in the requirements for the request. Failure to perform conversations for status leads to stress on the part of the requestor and other downstream performers. When the way that the performer will do the work has an impact on the way other work should be performed, failing to communicate this leads to rework and wasted effort. Failure to conduct conversations for status on the part of the requestor when the requirements have changed, also leads to rework and waste.
Each conversation has specific elements that, when they exist, improve project performance. When they don’t exist, the conversations tend to be ineffective. One of the complaints heard is that there isn’t time to have the conversations and that it takes to much work to get the conversations right each time. However, over the course of any successful project, the understanding, coordinating, and committing conversations take place within the project team. So no time is saved by not having the conversations, and doing them purposefully and effectively can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to perform the work.
On your next project effort, pay attention to the conversations for understanding, coordinating and committing. Notice what exists when the conversations are effective, and what is lacking when the conversations aren’t effective. Don’t work to improve process standards or documentation for the sake of improving. Improve them so that they enable effective conversation. When you do run into problems, look at the list of conversations and try to determine what the appropriate conversation is to move the project forward successfully
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Dennis Stevens leads Synaptus, a consulting firm that helps executives improve business performance by connecting strategy to execution. For more information, please visit www.synaptus.com.