I’m doing a series of blogs over at EasyProjects.Net .

Full disclosure, I’m one of their consultants. I go in and help their clients implement the methodology that surrounds the great tool.

This series is designed to help the project manager who is working off the side of their desk. Often someone with a reputation for getting things done, the volunteered or voluntold PM can find themselves quickly overwhelmed when faced with a project.

I hope you like it.

Perry

How about setting a goal for customer satisfaction? If you set some standards of performance, you can measure them at the end. If your team has a challenge with customer communication, one way to improve it is to make it a part of the success of the project.

Is stakeholder management a challenge? How about finding a way to measure the satisfaction your stakeholders feel at the end of the project.

These two ideas require that someone in the team take on a role of management. If you want to measure  satisfaction, you start by agreeing on what that means and you have to continue to check throughout the project that you are meeting the expectations. Does it mean you have to do everything the client  or stakeholder wants? No. It means you need to manage the expectations and keep in communication with people.

Have you used something interesting for success measures on your projects? Leave a comment with your ideas.

Happy PMing.

Perry

If you have never created a communication plan, here’s the short list of things to consider;

• start with a strategy – what are you communicating
• create an objective – what are the concrete goals for the communication plan
• identify your audience – there may be several different groups
• develop the key messages – the key messages usually are the same no matter how many audiences you have
• identify the communication channels
• deliver and assess

Now that you have your plan, and you are working the plan, let’s talk about what benefits you will see.

When you are communicating the right information to the right people, in the right way, everyone has the opportunity to understand the project. Note, I said they have the opportunity, not that they will understand. For the people who still require help you also have consistent messaging to use.

When you focus on communication it becomes easier to find your audience and align the messaging. If there is no plan for what and how to communicate, often you find yourself pulling communications together on demand and finding the closest channel rather than the right channel.

Planning early for communication allows you to set measures for communication success and that allows you to adjust the communications if it’s not meeting the objectives.

Having a schedule to communicate can sometimes help meet a goal or get a decision tied down. Why? Because when you have a plan your driver is to get information into the communication. When you don’t have a plan, there may be no driver, and communication gets delayed rather than driven.

Do you have any thoughts on communication planning?

If you would like a template for a communication plan, send me an email, and I’ll forward one to you.

Happy PMing

Perry

I’ve worked on four successive credit union mergers and each time we developed looser success criteria. The reason we did this is integration and success on mergers is complicated and we found the tighter we tried to control it, the less successful we became.

At the beginning of the project, you may not know enough about the technical integration details to develop success criteria. I’ve found it much more useful to start with guiding principles and develop success criteria as knowledge grows.

The integration of the people is somewhat easier to plan – harder to achieve success. The key parts are communication, training, communication, training and transparency – oh, and communication.

Trying to achieve smooth people transition is a false goal. If you acknowledge that there will be challenges and hard times, it builds perspective. The difficult times will be difficult, but no one is measuring them against false promises of easy transition.

Guiding principles can be as simple as – minimize customer disruption, maximize employee involvement, transparent communication.

What this means is that you begin to set success criteria when you know enough to set realistic ones.

As and example, our transition date for the banking platform data was a key criteria.

By setting the date based on executive wishes,

• we had to make changes to the date,
• we had to reschedule training,
• we had to re-communicate information to staff and members and
• we had to work the team long hard hours.

By setting the date based on analysis of the banking platform, we were able to

• pick a date we could stick to
• initiate structured training and change management
• clearly communicate the progress, and upcoming milestones
• clearly communicate to the membership what was happening
• identify innovative approaches to meet the guiding principles
• let the people who were leaving know the date they could go on to their new journeys

Does anyone else have tips for project managers on mergers and acquisitions?

The conference brings together new and experienced writers with agents, publishers, editors and our own rock stars – best selling authors.

The stakeholders were diverse, and the stakes were high. The team did a great job, there were no visible issues – though I’m sure they handled many hiccups and challenges over the conference.

Big congrats to all.