Principal and founder of The Vargas Group
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About the Webinar: RYMA's January 6th webinar was presented by Pattie Vargas. She presented a very under publicized issue, Stakeholder Management. She says, "Yes you can!" Not only can you, but you should.
Stakeholders have different needs and expectations. They also have differing agendas, motivations and behaviors! The successful manager discovers:
* What about this product initiative is important to this stakeholder?
* What will I need to do to meet their needs?
* What represents success to them?
* What communication methods will be most effective?
Utilizing situational communication strategies will improve the odds of initiative success by understanding and connecting with each stakeholders' needs.
About the Presenter: Pattie Vargas, Principal and founder of The Vargas Group, brings a strong background in business management, project management, and practical experience challenging and motivating organizations and individuals to develop self-motivated, high-performing work teams. Her success lies in inspiring peak performance and outstanding achievements, despite the typical organizational constraints related to budget, time or resources. Her focus on the importance of developing strong interpersonal skills and relationships is instrumental to achieving success.
Pattie has a bachelor's degree in Business Management, a Master's Degree in Organizational Management and PMP certification from Project Management Institute. She has been published in ISSIG Bits, a PMI publication specific to Information Technology projects, BizSanDiego, ASTD Training Trends, PM Connection and Women in Technology International. Her team-building techniques have been featured in PM Network magazine.
She is a frequent national conference speaker on the topics of Leadership, Team-building, and Performance Improvement. The American Business Women's Association named Pattie one of the 2007 Top 10 Business Women and she was nominated to the 2008 Women Who Mean Business List by the San Diego Business Journal.
Her book, EXTREME Project Manager Makeover, was released in 2008.
A comment on main moneybag guy disruption:
- That happens a lot and I agree with Pattie's answers but still there is very little we as PM could help in cases where the money bag guy has already decided.
- There is one other guy who is worse then the moneybag guy and he is the senior PM who does not have a grip on the business case(s) or the technical activities. I have instances where he would walk-in and destroy the whole product definition in the elaboration phase. And since he is the senior, our heirarchical org. takes in his decisions. A couple of my development partners were quite upset and it is hard for me to keep things together in such situations.
What do you suggest Pattie in such a case?
BR; Naresh
Naresh - good question and no easy answers. Situations such as this have to be handled on a case by case basis. Here are some ideas:
1. Choose your battles. If the Sr PM disrupts things on a regular basis, the team can become desensitized to the importance of his injecting himself in the process and be annoyed regardless of the impact. As the TRUE leader, help your team see when the changes are no big deal. As I mentioned in the Webinar, handled right, having a common "adversary" (and I say that carefully) can be very helpful in rallying your team.
2. Figure out some way to get to the person ABOVE the Sr PM or, if that is politically impossible, some other person with significant clout and influence who can advise you. At the very least, you have made your issue public to someone outside of the team and the person you have made aware may be able to plead your case when it all goes south. In the Best Case scenario, this SR PM has already demonstrated other problems and his mgt is aware. Your input could help them make a decision to move this person elsewhere.
Question from the Webinar: When speaking of 'change' and more specifically 'culture change' in a company - in average - what's the expected time till start feeling changes are coming to life?
It depends on the size of the effort. I've heard that, statistically, it takes 5 years to fully affect cultural change. That might be true if the organization is large, the culture is deeply entrenched and you have many years of bad behavior to correct. But based on my experience and the experience of the colleagues I work with, the following are keys to impacting change quickly and with a higher potential for success:
1. Plan carefully - don't have a knee-jerk reaction to market or financial changes. Know WHY the change is necessary. Involve cross-functional representation.
2. Once you've done the planning - move quickly. Nothing dilutes the power of change like dragging it out and appearing wishy-washy about it. It is going to happen - we are not going backward - full steam ahead.
3. Communicate extensively. In the absence of information, employees and team members make things up. Whatever you are doing to communicate - triple it. Use multiple avenues - intranets, wikis, town hall meetings, one-on-one, etc.
4. Have a clear vision and strategy for achieving it. Share key performance indicators that demonstrate where you are falling short or meeting the mark.
5. Have an open-door policy where employees can voice their concerns. Even if there is nothing you can do to change the process, giving them a venue to complain, vent, and question helps.
6. Focus on activity - cross-training, product development, etc, that indicates forward movement.
Those are just a few ideas about managing cultural change in your organization. www.towersperrin.com is a great resource on topics like these.
Question from webinar: In your experience, as you 'Listen to understand...' do you find that very few people are striving to understand back?
I have found that people tend to respond in kind - when you demonstrate respect to them by listening first, they feel validated. If this behavior is a big change for you, it may take awhile for them to notice, believe you, and then respond appropriately. And even if they don't, do it anyway because it's the right thing to do.
Question from the Webinar: How do you modify this process when you're working with outside stakeholders such as partners or vendors? How do you balance holding them accountable to their agreements while still giving them what they need?
I try to build strong relationships and collaborate with my outside stakeholders as much as possible in order to alleviate any turf wars that could derail my project. When selecting a vendor partner, the ability to do this is a key factor in my selection process - if they are difficult during the selection process, they're not going to get easier to deal with during the project. I want them to be committed to the success of the project and MY success, knowing that I have the ability to recommend more business for them - they need to understand this is a two-way street.
As for holding them accountable, they have deliverables and schedules that are tracked on my project plan just like anyone else. They participate in project review meetings where appropriate (not every meeting but regularly) and financial incentives could also tied to their milestone deliveries.
I don't treat them differently from other stakeholders other than communicating in the manner that means the most to them: respect, success, future business and recommendations.
Question from the webinar: How do you manage this process when part of your job is to get between people with wildly different needs or interests and try to articulate what you think is the right approach? Especially when those people have a LOT of power?
As the project or product manager, this is, unfortunately, part of the job. But it is to be expected - rarely will all your stakeholders have exactly the same needs, perspective and interests. I am not crazy about confrontation so this was (and is) always a challenge for me. Here is an example of one particularly difficult experience:
My team was tasked with building a support system for a brand new product that the company was launching. The new product was going to have its own support center, support system, and the support center was expected to be a revenue generating group. We were outside contractors so there were several "factions" who were not happy with the whole idea; the existing help desk wondered why they weren't supporting the product, the IT managers wondered how they would get resources for their work when competing with an IT revenue generating project and the internal developers who designed the product had very specific ideas about how it should be supported. Since this was a short-term project and I didn't have the time to invest in slowly building credibility and relationships, I laid the decision making on all of them. I facilitated several brainstorming sessions where I validated their subject matter expertise and the perspectives they all brought to the table, I proposed several solutions that I had already carefully vetted to ensure they could work and then led them in selecting one they could all live with. We used a Chip Vote/Consolidation process that helped all parties feel they had been represented and heard.
Bringing them into the decision making is much easier than trying to convince them YOU have the right idea. Let those big power dogs fight it out among themselves.