It's Not About Me or You
Mark Jackson, A-CSPO
Principal Manager @ Microsoft Healthcare | Agile Project Management, Azure DevOps
These statements occurred during recent status meetings I attended:
Although not expressed by the speakers, specific actions followed these statements. These are my edited versions of the statements that make the speakers’ expectations explicit based on the actions:
These are commonplace activities in corporate and academic environments where individuals unfamiliar with one another need to collaborate to solve a problem or to produce a deliverable.
A Potential Trap
In my experience, the above statements rarely elicit the following question: how do these requests and their associated activities relate to the goals of the project? Omitting this question can lead teams to conclude, incorrectly, that their efforts are intended to achieve only the following goals:
The group may deem these goals worthwhile or even essential; and yet, the above goals are unlikely to be the reasons the organization invested in the project at hand. More likely, there’s a customer (internal or external to the organization) who needs the value the organization plans to deliver. Fulfilling the customer’s expectations regarding schedule, functionality, and cost are the project’s primary goals. Achieving these goals generates revenue and reputation for the organization and elicits excitement from the team.
Keep an Eye on the Prize
Teams can lose sight of the ultimate goal—delighting their customers—when they shift focus to intermediate goals owned by stakeholders. Have you ever worked on a project that satisfied its internal success criteria but failed to gain adoption from its intended customers? The root cause for the failure may have been the team lacking access to their customer and not being able to demonstrate interim functionality to their customer. Lack of customer engagement delays feedback which can slow value delivery.
领英推荐
Large projects encapsulate many activities, deliverables, and checkpoints. Customers prefer not to be burdened with this minutia: they want to relish our output without needing to experience every stage of our proverbial “sausage making.” But each internal activity should contribute, as directly as possible, to the customer’s delight. Activities that don’t contribute to the project’s ultimate success criteria should be labeled “waste” or at best “necessary evils,” and should be minimized.
Leaders serve their teams best by training them to self-organize and to establish relationships with their customers. Anything that stands between the team and their customer should be in the leader’s crosshairs to eliminate. Identifying prospective customers and bringing them in contact with delivery teams is rarely a trivial exercise. Leaders may need to convince and incentivize customers to share their workflows and expectations with the team and to evaluate the team’s imperfect, incremental deliverables. The leader’s influence and networking skills enable their teams to nurture rich relationships with customers.
How Do I Justify My Role?
In hierarchical environments, we’re all answerable to superiors or administrative bodies. We’re measured by MBOs and performance metrics. A project manager, for example, assembles team members and presents status updates. Executing these tasks succinctly and eloquently empowers leaders to make decisions regarding scope, investments, and customer and partner relationships.?
How does the project manager fulfill their job responsibilities AND minimize process waste while also ensuring the team remains focused on the project’s ultimate objectives? One strategy involves adopting a customer-centric and team-centric communication style. Rather than starting statements with “I” and “we,” as in the examples at the beginning of this article, begin as many statements as possible with “our customer” and “the team.” This may seem like a simple game of semantics but the shift in language can reorient teams away from stakeholders toward their customers and their core competencies. Here are few examples:
If fulfilling the above requests requires scheduling meetings and/or creating PowerPoint slides, go for it. If not, find the best way to satisfy your customer and your team’s needs above achieving your internal procedural steps.
Prioritize Outcomes Above Activities
Once customer-oriented language takes hold within your organization, go a step further by including customers (internal or external) in meetings. In place of talking about customers, speak to them and hear from them directly at status checks and demonstrations. Ask for their feedback and insights. Encourage your teams to solicit input from customers whenever it’s needed instead of waiting for standard meetings.
Having customers at ceremonies may feel uncomfortable at first since we don’t want to “air dirty laundry” in front of them. Over time, their presence feels natural since it’s the most efficient approach to drive tight feedback loops and to make course corrections as early as possible. Ultimately, an organization should gauge its progress and success according to customer input; not internal metrics. Feedback from customers (positive or negative) governs how much activity an organization spends on planning and tracking activities: minimize the spend on planning and tracking activities and maximize the value delivery to the customer.