Gather project requirements and create a communication strategy

Gather requirements

In gathering requirements, project managers must consider how long the project is expected to take, what its expected costs are, who needs to be involved in the project, the risks the project may face, the technical and business requirements and any technical constraints (Meick, 2022). There are two types of requirements: functional and non-functional. Functional encompasses product features and user requirements, and can include system specifications, business rules, authentication methods, traceability, legal requirement, identity access management, and user interfaces (Gorbachenko, n.d.). Non-functional requirements entail those that impact performance and user experience, including system speed, uptime, capacity, reliability, and usability (Gorbachenko, n.d.).

During this process, project managers need to assign roles within the team, such as who will design, test, and code. They will need to interview stakeholders and users to understand what they want to achieve from the project, including goals and risks. Then they will set project goals, schedule and milestones, team members and roles, requirements and risks. After this, they will need to communicate with stakeholders to reach agreement on project constraints and requirements (Meick, 2022).

Project managers need to ensure that requirements are clear, concise, verifiable, consistent (there are no other requirements that contradict the acceptance criteria for a particular requirement), complete, and traceable (each requirement has a unique identifier by which it can be assessed) (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Communicate with stakeholders

Why is a good stakeholder communication plan important?

Preparing a good stakeholder management communication plan before, during, and after the project is a major contributor to project success — companies see 3.5x better results with effective internal communication and informed employees outperform peers by 77% (OCM Solution, n.d.). To ensure adequate communication with stakeholders, project managers must create a communication plan, which details the type of communication such as awareness, scheduling, or training, who in the company will receive communication, how the communication will be provided, the details of the communication itself, who will be responsible for providing the communication, and what critical milestones to expect (OCM Solution, n.d.).

A project performance domain includes all activities that are imperative for a project to be successful (Project Management Institute, 2021). There are eight areas: stakeholders, team, development approach, planning, project work, delivery, measurement, and uncertainty (Project Management Institute, 2021). In the stakeholder project domain, the project manager and team need to maintain a productive working relationship with stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle, ensure that they have stakeholder buy-in to project objectives, and that they have a plan to benefit from the support of happy stakeholders and to mitigate the risk and assuage concerns of the stakeholders who may not see the value in the project (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Stakeholders encompass any individuals, groups, or organizations that may be affected by or perceive that they are affected by the project, thus the project manager needs to gather and analyze information to determine which people might be impacted and should thus be kept either consulted or informed about the progress of the project, as well as how to form positive relationships and make them feel invested in the solution (Project Management Institute, 2021). Depending on the length of a project and the turnover rate of team members, the project manager and team will need to consider the evolution of stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle (Project Management Institute, 2021).

To engage stakeholders before or when the project starts, the analysis portion of this plan must include identifying, understanding, analyzing, prioritizing, engaging, and monitoring stakeholders throughout the project (Project Management Institute, 2021). It is important to define and share a clear vision when the project starts to foster good relationships and team and stakeholder alignment throughout (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Identify high-level stakeholders and understand power dynamics

In the identify part of the plan, the project manager identifies the high-level stakeholders, including the customer, sponsor, team, and end users. In the understand and analyze phase of the plan, the project manager and team need to try to understand stakeholders feelings, beliefs, and values, as well as each stakeholder’s position in relation to the project as well as their perspective about the project (Project Management Institute, 2021). This includes looking at the stakeholder dynamics, including power, impact, attitude, beliefs, expectations, degree of influence, proximity to the project, and interest in the project (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Next, the project manager and team must prioritize the stakeholders who have most power and interest (Project Management Institute, 2021). The team needs to leverage their soft skills, particularly around active listening, interpersonal skills, and conflict management (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Create a stakeholder communication strategy

Stakeholders could include primary stakeholders, project sponsors, influencers, champions, and end users (OCM Solution, n.d.). The communication plan includes assessing stakeholders for support, resistance, and willingness to help, developing key project messaging such as benefits, goals, metrics, and vision of the project, and having the plan reviewed before it is deployed (OCM Solution, n.d.)

Depending on the culture of the company, the communication can be written or verbal, and informal or formal. Formal and verbal could include presentations, project reviews, briefings, demos, and brainstorming sessions, while written formal would include progress reports, documentation, and business case. On the informal side, verbal includes conversations, while written includes notes, emails, and Slack or other instant messaging, among other methods (Project Management Institute, 2021).

The team needs to be aware that even though they’ve provided updates on the project, the stakeholders are likely busy with their own jobs, thus may not have noticed or digested the information; to that end, the project manager needs to make sure that the stakeholders got the update, gauge their reaction to the update, and garner any other information from the stakeholders as a result (Project Management Institute, 2021).

This moves into the monitor phase of the plan, which requires the project manager to assess current and potential new stakeholders, as well as determine if their communication and engagement strategy needs to be modified (Project Management Institute, 2021). Depending on the power and project position of the stakeholder, they should be involved in defining and prioritizing requirements, planning, determining acceptance criteria and the definition of done for user stories. They can also reduce uncertainty and risk of a project, depending on how well they are engaged and their expectations managed, by focusing on measuring the performance of a project (Project Management Institute, 2021), such as feature adoption or user sentiment.

Why is it important to communicate with the project sponsor?

To ensure that the project aligns with company objectives and goals, arguably the most important stakeholder is the project sponsor (Project Management Institute, 2021). Sponsors connect the company strategy of the executive level to the project, providing the team with necessary skillsets and resources (Project Management Institute, 2021). Depending on whether the project sponsor ideated the project or the project was presented to the potential project sponsor, either the sponsor or the project manager will communicate the vision, goals and expectations (Project Management Institute, 2021), balance various stakeholder needs and priorities and make trade-offs, making any necessary executive-level decisions (Project Management Institute, 2021).

The sponsor will work with team members to mediate any conflicts, ensuring that the project stays aligned with business objectives, and removing blockers (Project Management Institute, 2021). This person should support the team to help create the structure, culture, processes, roles, and work to improve the outcomes, as well as monitor project outcomes to ensure organizational benefits are achieved (Project Management Institute, 2021).

They will keep the team updated if there are shifts in priority due to market, competitors, economy, or other factors. They are often accountable for the project outcome and can approve or reject project deliverables. The sponsor works between the team and the rest of the executive C-suite to keep team members on the project and reduce changes in scope, quality, schedule, and cost.

Communicate with the team and celebrate wins

In addition to managing stakeholders, the project manager also needs a clear, trustworthy, timely manner of communicating with the project team itself. The team culture should also be considered, whether it would work better to formally codify project team norms or rely on team members’ actions and behaviors to form the culture (Project Management Institute, 2021). This includes being transparent about how each other thinks, make choices, and process information, as well as sharing any biases which would impact the success of the project (Project Management Institute, 2021).

The project manager and team should be honest about communicating risks and likelihoods that the risks would occur, sharing assumptions, communicating how they arrived at estimates, sharing information about delays and setbacks, such as newly discovered requirements, technical constraints, and shifting priorities as soon as possible, providing project statuses frequently, ideally even in real-time, letting others know if team members have conflicts of interest, ensuring that the team feels that their dynamics and workload are fair, and that everyone understands how project delays will impact cost (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Each team member needs to be respectful of everyone else, understanding their thought process, skills, and perspectives; although the team will inevitably have disagreements, the goal should be to find a compromise that people can live with, while still providing a quality user experience.

Project managers and team managers can support their people by aiding in solving problems, removing blockers, and creating a psychologically safe and collaborative environment, encouraging, showing empathy, listening attentively, and empowering team members to feel comfortable making suggestions to try something new or change something that is already in place, enabling a culture of experimentation and safety to ideate quickly and fail quickly (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Finally, the manager must celebrate the wins of the team, recognizing team members’ innovation, jumping in to help others, learning, and adapting, which will keep people motivated (Project Management Institute, 2021). The team should be able to communicate openly, have a shared understanding of the project goals and outcomes, a sense of shared ownership, trust in each other, willingness to collaborate to ideate quickly to come up with better ideas, demonstrate resilience to problems and adaptability to change (Project Management Institute, 2021). Team members should be able to work in the way that they feel that they perform most effectively, rather than being micromanaged (Project Management Institute, 2021).

Create a vision to ensure stakeholder and team buy-in

In creating the vision in collaboration with team members and key stakeholders, everyone needs to buy into the project purpose, the definition of successful project work, how the project will improve the company’s future, and how the team will know when it is not in alignment with the vision. The vision should summarize the project with a powerful description, detail the ideal outcome, and imbue everyone with the same story of the problem they are solving and what success will look like (Project Management Institute, 2021). Team members and stakeholders need to apply critical thinking skills to research and gather accurate, unbiased information, resolve issues, and identify biases, assumptions and values.

Everyone needs to understand the power of language and make sure to treat each other with compassion and understanding in choosing the words to communicate with each other, they need to analyze data and other information to make decisions together, as well as not being afraid to point out faulty logic or false hypotheses.

Because people tend to be distributed, it is important to ensure that there are collaboration methods to work together, a team site where all relevant team and project documentation is stored, making a more personal connection via sharing video during meetings, communicating via Slack or other instant messenger, building in tea/coffee chats to get to know each other, and ideally meeting face-to-face at least once (Project Management Institute, 2021).

References

Alami, A. (February 2016). Why do Information Technology projects fail? Procedia Computer Science Vol. 100. Retrieved November 3, 2022, from https://eds-p-ebscohost-com.ccco.idm.oclc.org/eds/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=c1ae826f-5d25-4139-bd9a-37458ab36c74%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=118542021&db=edo

Gorbachenko, P. (2021, November 18). Functional vs Non-Functional Requirements [Updated 2021]. Enkonix. Retrieved November 9, 2022, from https://enkonix.com/blog/functional-requirements-vs-non-functional/

Lavallo, D. and Kahneman, D. (2003). Delusions of success: How optimism undermines executives’ decisions. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://hbr.org/2003/07/delusions-of-success-how-optimism-undermines-executives-decisions

Meick, A. (August 16, 2022). How to use a requirements gathering template. project-management.com: The ultimate reference for project managers. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://project-management.com/requirements-gathering-template-guide/

OCM Solution. (n.d.). Best stakeholder communication plan & strategy guide. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.ocmsolution.com/stakeholder-communication-plan/

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) — Seventh edition — and The Standard for Project Management (ENGLISH). Project Management Institute. Retrieved November 9, 2022, from https://eds-p-ebscohost-com.ccco.idm.oclc.org/eds/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzI5NDI0MjlfX0FO0?sid=288b33d9-cc3a-4f01-a74d-eb98312263a0@redis&vid=1&format=EK&rid=1