Social media tools appeal to that part of all of us that want and need to connect to other humans like us, – to find groups, clubs, lodges, and communities that we have something in common with and contribute in a meaningful way – even if it’s to just share a story or an insight that is uniquely us.  We all crave a sense of belonging, contribution, enrichment, and fellowship.  That’s why we join churches, gyms, civic and professional organizations, sororities, fraternities, etc.  When we are comfortably established within a circle, we naturally want to reach out and keep up and find out what’s new within our circle and share the thoughts, ideas and events that are important to us.  Social media platforms allow us the ability to do this easily and virtually.  Since we have the same needs on projects – to establish an environment that fosters effective communication and information flow between stakeholders, it would seem that social media tools would be a natural answer.  Why then, is there not more success?

A Brand Science Institute study performed in Europe in August 2010 suggested that most social media projects will fail.  As commented further by Jacob Morgan of Chess Media Group, a management consultancy and strategic advisory firm on social business, this is because clearly defined values are usually not established at the onset of a social strategy for both the customer and the company.  Creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account because it’s “cool” , but not really knowing what you plan to do with it is a recipe for failure.  The project will end up with a presence that has unorganized, uncontrolled, or nonexistent content.   Here are some specific tips for using social media tools on projects:

• First, establish a strategy and purpose for the social media tools chosen.  This could be something such as to promote collaboration and foster active participation in communications – both the sending and receiving of information.
• Establish policies and procedures.  Determine any security barriers:  will external internet platforms be acceptable for use and if so how?    If not, create tools or “characteristics” internally using sharepoint or the intranet.  Define ground rules for usage – what restrictions will be enforced.  How will the tools be moderated, and who will do the moderation?  Document the calendar of publications, or any expectations of how the tools should be used.  Create any templates or forms that will be employed.
• Suggestions for project specific uses of social media tools:
  • Wiki’s – Wiki’s encourage collaboration by team members on project documentation and can be used for any type of project documentation: code, requirements, test cases, design specifications, project management artifacts, or end user help documentation.
  • Blogs – Blogs can be used to allow team members to write articles on progress, challenges, or best practices in their discipline.  Blogs from the project manager could contain the status reports.  Specialty blogs could contain messages from the sponsor.
  • Audio/Video messages – Podcasts (audio messages) and videos can be used for training communications or inspirational messages from the sponsor.  The elements of sound and video add richness to a message and give it more depth and dimension than written text alone.
  • Youtube – Youtube can be used as a repository to research expert presentations on best practices.
  • LinkedIn – Linkedin is a professional virtual networking site, which similar to the use of Youtube can facilitate research.  It supports targeting professionals or organizations by certain search criteria, participating in group discussion threads, posting questions, and recruiting.
  • Twitter – Twitter can be used to post brief updates on project activities available to followers of the account.  Consider the benefits of this as contrasted with more traditional approaches such as emailing a large distribution list or embedding within a long status report.  The account’s historical tweet stream has search capability, hash tags to categorize topics with keywords, and the ability to embed shortened URL’s to point to other web content.  Yammer is a corporate (non public) tool that allows similar functionality if security restrictions do not permit the use of Twitter over the public internet.
  • Facebook – A Facebook page can be set up for the project to post stories about social gatherings of team activities in different locations.  This helps promote bonding between the team members who are not co-located. 

The point is, in order to tap into that natural instinct we all have to reach out to each other and share – which seems to be all too elusive on projects sometimes – we need to incorporate the “F” word.  We need to introduce a little FUN.  The extent to which social media tools are pounded on by our team members outside of work is testament to their appeal, so why not have them work in favor of the project instead of against it?

Project management is always a matter of scale.  It is not a one size fits all proposition and there are times when we as project managers should remember to just do the simple things.  Sometimes the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) principle is really the best.  Imagine you have just been asked to organize the team rollout victory party for next week.  That’s the project.  You have 2 administrative assistants to help you.  That’s your team.  Are you going to develop a WBS dictionary, document a communication plan, and perform a quantitative assessment of risks?  I doubt it.  By the same token will you abandon any semblance of planning and completely wing it?  I hope not!  Not if you are a project management professional.  Any endeavor that is temporary and produces a unique product, service or result deserves a plan – one of appropriate size and scale.

Scope:  So, in our example you sit down with your 2 administrative assistants in your office and pull up a spreadsheet.  The 3 of you brainstorm what tasks need to be done in the next week to pull off the team party.  You discuss where the party will be held, what food will be brought in, how invitations will be handled, entertainment, etc.  You capture all these tasks in a column of the spreadsheet.  You have just defined the scope of your project as a list of tasks.

Resources: Next, you decide who is going to do each task on your list.  There are only the 3 of you on your team so one of the 3 of you has to be assigned to each task.  In a 2^nd column of the spreadsheet you assign a name to each task.  You have just performed resource allocation.

Schedule: Next, the team needs to determine when each task needs to be done.  This is an example of a time-boxed, fixed date project.  The party will be communicated for a specific date, so all preparation activities must take place prior to that date.  Working backwards from the party date, in a third column, the team fills in target date/times of when tasks must be completed by.  You have just performed activity dependency and scheduling for your project.

Budget: You think about how much each task will likely cost and note that in a 4^th column.  The sum of these cost estimates forms your budget.

Risk:  You ask your team “Is there anything that worries you?”   One of the admin assistants replies: “What if we can’t reserve a restaurant large enough on such short notice?”  So, you decide to add a task to the list to reserve a large conference room at your company and investigate catering at the company as a backup precaution.  You have just performed some risk management planning. Maybe it is not extensive or as rigorous as it could be, but it is better than doing nothing, and probably appropriate for this size effort.

Communication and project execution:  You decide to have a daily 15 minute meeting over the next week as you each carry out your assigned tasks.  I like the agile iterative process format for daily meetings as far as providing a simple way to get project updates.  In each meeting, every team member answers 3 questions:

1. What have you done since the last time we met?
2. What do you plan to do between now and the next time we meet?
3. What impediments are preventing you from making progress?

In answering those 3 questions, you are providing progress measurements that can be compared to the plan.  You are providing forecasts that indicate if adjustments are warranted.  You are highlighting issues and risks that may lead to offline discussions to develop ad hoc workaround plans.

With a simple spreadsheet and some basic, obvious conversation you can manage a small non-complex project.  The tools used are not important, as long as the necessary steps of the project management process are covered.

I just established a war room for the beginning of a new project.  In its simplest terms, a war room is a workspace dedicated to a collocated project team, enabling team members to work together to quickly create a solution to a business problem or address a business opportunity. 

 Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

 This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share. 

 Ground Rules

I hate to start off a fun topic with something as pedestrian as rules, but when you have a group work space, it’s best to begin with a clear understanding of boundaries. 

 In my experience, the biggest issues are usually around non-project discussions in the project work room.  I always have a rule that anyone can stop by the War Room to have a quick discussion with a project resource, but those discussions cannot last longer than 5 minutes.  This is clearly stated in the room on a WAR ROOM RULES poster, and I have a kitchen timer nearby just for that purpose.  It not only protects the other folks in the room from having their space co-opted by a non-project meeting, it actually helps the project resource from continually being pulled back into non-project work that has been reassigned (successfully or not) to someone else. 

 The other way this issue rears its ugly head is in cell-phone conversations.  We have all worked on a team with someone whose spouse or children call every 20 minutes.  I have a rule that there will be no non-project related telephone conversations in the War Room either.  If you need to take a personal call, step out of the room.  If you have a teleconference that is not related to the project, attend from another location.

 Another idea is to post “core work hours” for the project room, during which all resources will be in the room and available.  Not only does this clear the way for collaborative work, it lets resources set the expectations of their managers, peers and customers appropriately. 

 Creature Comforts

I think a War Room ought to be a pleasing place that people are excited to be assigned to.  Food is one of the easiest ways to turn a work session into an “event”.  I always provision my War Rooms with snacks (both healthy and unhealthy) to send the message that “you, and the work we are doing here together, is special, not run of the mill or routine”. 

 I bring in lunch and/or breakfast on deadline days to send the message that the time and attention of the people on the project team is so important to the success of the project that I don’t want them worrying about finding something to eat.

 Don’t forget about other things that contribute to a comfortable work space.  Keep the area clean.  Open a window or bring in air fresheners.  Do what you can to create a temperature that is comfortable to most of the people most of the time, and bring in fans or heaters for people who need them. 

Depending on the people in the room and the work underway, I have played music in the room.  In one of my War Rooms, we worked European business hours for three weeks one December, requiring us to start our work day at 2:00 am every day.  We played Christmas music and had bagels every morning to get the day started. 

 On another project we had a huge, all-hands-on deck “cut and paste” effort to get some data normalized into a giant excel spreadsheet. Because our customer had dropped the ball on it, my team undertook this really low-value but critical task.  The team worried that we wouldn’t be able to stay awake during the 8-12 hours it would take to complete the work.  So, I streamed a Law and Order: SVU marathon through the projector and we ordered pizza for lunch, and everyone talked about how it reminded them of cram sessions they endured in college.  This tedious task turned out to be a team-building effort because we all pitched in and made the best out of a bad situation. 

 Visuals

People are stimulated by graphics and visual representations so you should have some project artifacts on the walls of your War Room.  Not only can these be appealing and information for the people on the team, they can be a great way to share information about the project to the rest of your organization. 

Use the space you have to guide project discussions and underline project information.  A blank wall becomes a living flow chart with painter’s tape for swim lanes and sticky notes for process information.  You can easily make and print calendars and tape them around the room, although I prefer large dry erase calendars that can be used for planning and what-if scenarios. 

Testimonials, customer artifacts (anything with a logo) and company information can be used to keep people focused on the long term goals of the project. 

Then take all that useful visual information and hold a project “Open House”.  Send out invitations and invite people to come in, visit with the team, and see what’s going on in the work room.  Make it a fun event with food (ice cream social, anyone?) and door prizes.  Tying this in with major project milestones can also serve your change management and communications plans as well.   

 Customs

Finally, it’s hard to create traditions, but you can certainly recognize trends that can turn into War Room Customs. 

 For example, I worked with one gentleman who would say “Big brain on so and so” whenever someone had a great idea.  Eventually we would all say it to each other to recognize a good idea – “Big brain on Bob today!”, so I went to a teacher’s supply store and bought a… big brain.   Then when we wanted to recognize someone, we would say “Big brain on Beth” and toss Beth the big brain.

 At another organization, we used the word “sacred cow” quite frequently, so I bought a small, stuffed cow that we would hand around the table when we wanted to challenge someone to think differently about and idea they demonstrated a stubborn loyalty toward.

 These are some of my best practices, and I am eager to hear yours.

• The first iteration will almost always be a bust. The team is learning how to estimate their work an entirely new way with relative story points, and assessing how much work can be fit into a preset allotment of time. It is very typical for the team to overshoot and not get all the work done that they carve out for themselves. It usually takes 1 or 2 iterations for the team to gauge their velocity or number of story points they can accomplish in an iteration. Only then should an attempt be made to do any type of release planning so you will know how many iterations it will take to achieve all the functionality desired in the release.
• One of the benefits of agile is the flexibility is offers around scope change between iterations, but the cardinal rule is that once the scope of the iteration or sprint is set, no one disrupts the team. That means no high level stakeholders pulling rank and diverting team members to go work on another project. This is one of the reasons the iterations are kept short – no more than 30 days usually, and sometimes shorter, so that the team comes up for air frequently to entertain changes. An obvious issue with this design is the case where the same team must support bug fixes as well as new feature development. One solution to this is to build into every iteration some buffer stories for unknown bug fixes that can be assigned if critical bugs are logged during the iteration that must be addressed by one of the team members.
• On an agile team there is no traditional command and control model. There is no traditional project manager role. The scrum master has no direct authority; he/she is more a facilitator. The team is self directed and self organizing. The team members assign themselves work from the waiting tasks list. This is a hard one for many managers to swallow. They believe that without a supervisor to crack the whip, the team members will have no motivation to work. Most scrum masters find the opposite is actually true. If anything, they have to coach the team to be less aggressive and not bite off more than they can chew. When held accountable for their own work team members will most often rise to the occasion and try harder to prove their worth and value. Where scrum masters do add value is to coach team members to direct their effort towards completeness of fewer stories rather than near completeness of more stories. The only stories that can be demoed at the end of an iteration are completed stories.
• Agile means fewer artifacts. There is a product backlog containing user stories, iteration backlog, and some burn down charts. Typically that’s it. If there is anything more, it is due to organizational culture requirements. As the engineering progresses and conversation happens between developer and business, validation requirements (which is where typical detailed business specifications would be captured) will be developed and captured as part of the test driven development process – which is where it should be to have any real utility. How often have you really ever looked at those extensive business requirement documents (BRDs) after they’ve been developed? Certainly by the time a new project is launched, they are usually outdated and if they are even archived anywhere, they are usually never looked at again. All that effort wasted. So spending the effort getting the right people talking in the first place and documenting where it needs to be won’t result in a lack of valuable documentation, because all those BRDs were never truly valued much in the first place.

Spend time making sure your management really understands how the new agile team will work with each other and with others in the organization and what is expected of them before you start. They will appreciate the education and it just might keep you from becoming the next Dilbert cartoon.

Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share. 

Ground rules

I hate to start off a fun topic with something as pedestrian as rules, but when you have a group work space, it’s best to begin with a clear understanding of boundaries. 

In my experience, the biggest issues are usually around non-project discussions in the project work room.  I always have a rule that anyone can stop by the War Room to have a quick discussion with a project resource, but those discussions cannot last longer than 10 minutes.  This is clearly stated in the room on a WAR ROOM RULES poster, and I have a kitchen timer nearby just for that purpose.  It not only protects the other folks in the room from having their space co-opted by a non-project meeting, it actually helps the project resource from continually being drug back into non-project work that they has been reassigned (successfully or not) to someone else. 

The other way this issue rears its ugly head is in cell-phone conversations.  We have all worked on a team with someone who’s spouse or children call every 20 minutes.  I have a rule that there will be no non-project related telephone conversations in the War Room either.  If you need to take a personal call, step out of the room.  If you have a teleconference that is not related to the project, attend from another location.

Another idea is to post “core work hours” for the project room, during which all resources will be in the room and available.  Not only does this clear the way for collaborative work, it lets resources set the expectations of their managers, peers and customers appropriately. 

Creature Comforts

I think a War Room ought to be a pleasing place that people are excited to be assigned to.  Food is one of the easiest ways to turn a work session into an “event”.  I always provision my War Rooms with snacks (both healthy and unhealthy) to send the message that “you, and the work we are doing here together, is special, not run of the mill or routine”. 

I bring in lunch and/or breakfast on deadline days to send the message that the time and attention of the people on the project team is so important to the success of the project that I don’t want them worrying about finding something to eat.

Don’t forget about other things that contribute to a comfortable work space.  Keep the area clean.  Open a window or bring in air fresheners.  Do what you can to create a temperature that is comfortable to most of the people most of the time, and bring in fans or heaters for people who need them. 

Depending on the people in the room and the work underway, I have played music in the room.  In one of my War Rooms, we worked European business hours for three weeks one December, requiring us to start our work day at 2:00 am every day.  We played Christmas music and had bagels every morning to get the day started. 

On another project we had a huge, all-hands-on deck “cut and paste” effort to get some data normalized into a giant excel spreadsheet. Because our customer had dropped the ball on it, my team undertook this really low-value but critical task.  The team worried that we wouldn’t be able to stay awake during the 8-12 hours it would take to complete the work.  So, I streamed a Law and Order: SVU marathon through the projector and we ordered pizza for lunch, and everyone talked about how it reminded them of cram sessions they endured in college.  This tedious task turned out to be a team-building effort because we all pitched in and made the best out of a bad situation. 

Visuals

People are stimulated by graphics and visual representations so you should have some project artifacts on the walls of your War Room.  Not only can these be appealing and information for the people on the team, they can be a great way to share information about the project to the rest of your organization. 

Use the space you have to guide project discussions and underline project information.  A blank wall becomes a living flow chart with painter’s tape for swim lanes and sticky notes for process information.  You can easily make and print calendars and tape them around the room, although I prefer large dry erase calendars that can be used for planning and what-if scenarios. 

Testimonials, customer artifacts (anything with a logo) and company information can be used to keep people focused on the long term goals of the project. 

Customs

Finally, it’s hard to create traditions, but you can certainly recognize trends that can turn into War Room Customs. 

For example, I worked with one gentleman who would say “Big brain on so and so” whenever someone had a great idea.  Eventually we would all say it to each other to recognize a good idea – “Big brain on Bob today!”, so I went to a teacher’s supply store and bought a… big brain.   Then when we wanted to recognize someone, we would say “Big brain on Beth” and toss Beth the big brain.

At another organization, we used the word “sacred cow” quite frequently, so I bought a small, stuffed cow that we would hand around the table when we wanted to challenge someone to think differently about and idea they demonstrated a stubborn loyalty toward.

These are some of my best practices, and I am eager to hear yours.

─ Online Poker estimating tool: (Free from Mountain Goat Software: www.planningpoker.com ) when teams are performing relative story point estimates and they are all in the same room, they frequently use poker cards. After discussing the story, each team member chooses the card with the number of points they believe the effort represents and all members hold up their card at the same time, so that no one is effected by anyone else’s vote. When someone is not in the room, this requires a different tool. There is an online version of the physical cards where members select their number and only when all members “playing the game” have made a choice, does the moderator release the selections so that everyone can see the numbers chosen.
─ Livemeeting, Gotomeeting, Webex, or other conferencing tools: tools allowing virtual meeting and presentation of materials or system demoing, remote desktop sharing, etc.
─ Skype, other teleconferencing tools: to allow virtual “face to face” interaction
─ Instant messaging: to allow texting/chatting between team members. There should be team covenants regarding responsiveness to IM, email, phone calls, and other forms of virtual contact in the absence of physical contact.
─ Sharepoint, Google Docs, Basecamp, other collaboration platforms: a strong collaboration platform is needed for storage of notes and design documentation. Team calendars, ground rules, conventions and protocols, time zone information, burn down charts, product backlogs, and other team artifacts can be stored here.

While some thought needs to be given to how to divide work and include remote teams or remote participants of a team, many organizations are successfully utilizing agile methods on virtual teams. As with any project any time, the key is in developing creative and consistent ways to communicate among the separated team members.

Processes:   The primary scrum processes allow for grooming of the product backlog or clarifying the complexity by specifying effort factor (story points), grouping work from the product backlog into work iterations, defining and estimating technical work tasks for the work iterations, and packaging completed outputs of the work iterations into a working release product.  Below is a breakdown of the different scrum processes along with their descriptions and analogous waterfall counterpart.

Meetings:    Since frequent feedback is the hallmark of agile, the scrum meeting are the settings that facilitate some of the above processes, as well as allow for frequent status during the work intervals or sprints, and provide the vehicle for the customer acceptance and process improvement.  Below is a table that describes the major scrum meetings, descriptions and their waterfall counterparts.

 Artifacts:  Artifacts are sparse compared to a typical waterfall methodology. All work “to do” is tracked on the product backlog.  Work “left to go”  is tracked on one of 2 types of burn down charts and are meant to show progress to the organization.  Business requirements will seem sketchy in agile as compared to waterfall since preference is given to conversations amongst members of the team, and verification through acceptance criteria and demonstrations.  Below is a description of scrum artifacts.

 In scrum, relative estimation keeps the estimation process intuitive and non specific.  It’s done in group session with the entire team where everyone “votes” on their number all at once to keep voting independent.  The relative story points assist the product manager in backlog prioritization.  Sprint planning makes up the rest of the planning for a 30 day period.  This is where the detailed task decomposition and hourly estimation occurs.

Once a sprint is planned, work is executed and monitored in the daily standup meetings.  Issues are tracked in the Sprint impediment log.  Progress is displayed to the organization in artifacts such as the sprint and product burn down charts.

At the end of the sprint, the work is verified and accepted or rejected in the sprint demonstration meeting.  Then the sprint processes are reviewed and suggestions for improvement are made in the sprint retrospective, before reprioritizing the product backlog if necessary and beginning a new sprint.

And while conventional wisdom says that social media is used primarily by the young, that’s not really true.  According to Forrester Research, the percentage of Boomers consuming social media was 67% for younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 62% for older Boomers (ages 53 to 63) in 2008.

In its Boomers and Social Media report, eMarketer notes that Boomers love Facebook far more than other social media sites, with 73% of the group claiming to maintain a Facebook profile. 

So, how can a project manager use social media?  Below are some ideas, but first a word of caution: when incorporating social media into your PR campaign, pay special attention to security and privacy issues.  The appeal of social media is its wide accessibility and its easy access, two strengths that can backfire on you, or someone on your team, if you share something your organization isn’t comfortable with.

Medium: Blogs / Wikis

Idea: start a project blog

A blog or wiki site is a great way to share project information and gather feedback, which helpts to create a collaborative environment.

YouTube

Idea: post a PowerPoint with music or audio or a simple video

This is a fun way to control your message and build your team.  Video messages from project leadership or sponsors can mean a lot to a dispersed team.  Video messages from different work sites can speed the process of building a virtual team. 

Twitter

Idea: create a group on Twitter using a unique hashtag

Twitter is best used for team building.  Create a hash tag for your project, a unique name preceded by the # sign, and make sure all of your Tweets include it.  Then your users can search for all the Tweets about the project.  This can be particularly engaging for a dispersed team, is popular with cell phone users, and can be used for quick updates in “teamspeak”.  Twitter feels much like instant messaging, but conversations on Twitter are searchable, so they are not private.   

Facebook / MySpace

Idea: create a project page in Facebook

A project page on Facebook or MySpace allows shareholders to comment and provide feedback.  This can be an engaging way to build a diverse team.  You can share project information or just fun stuff like pictures and videos of social gatherings or meetings.   These sites do have some privacy settings that will help you control who views this content. 

Linked In / PM Net

Idea: Research a project challenge on a business networking site

This is a great way to connect with experts in your field, gather a lot of ideas in a short time, and find or start a discussion about a topic that interests you.    

SharePoint/Google Sites:

Idea: Leverage the best ideas from social media for your internal tools

If you can’t take advantage of external social media tools, take the collaborative features that make social media so popular and apply them to your internal tools.  Start a blog, use videos and pictures, have a contest, just get people interested in collaborating.

In this case, the project manager is retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is in charge of the federal government’s response to the oil spill resulting from the April 20^th explosion at one of British Petroleum’s (BP) offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.  His title is officially National Incident Commander, but that just means he’s the most senior project manager on this mess.  I simply can’t imagine all the constraints he is juggling as he attempts to right things in the aftermath of the largest offshore oil spill in the history of the United States. 

Just consider force majeure effects the project manager has to deal with, particularly the weather.  Today, Day 96, brings the news that the cleanup effort that was halted due to the expected arrival of Tropical Storm Bonnie, is back on, as Bonnie failed to materialize.  Before anyone breathes a sigh of relief, however, officials are quick to point out that this is the season for tropical storms.  Weather experts are predicting ten this year and Bonnie was only the second.    

In Cindy’s blog last week, she talked about managing the public relations around troubled projects.  In the Deepwater Horizon situation, oil rig owner BP can hardly have done a worse job in the PR department.  CEO Tony Hayward has come across as flippant and out of touch in his many appearances before an American public that is very concerned about the environmental and economic impacts of this catastrophe.  In a dubious attempt to improve the company’s image, BP Board Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg stated several times that “We care about the small people,” which didn’t necessarily warm the hearts of the stakeholders who had not, until this point, considered themselves “the small people”.  Fortunately, Allen has done a much better job with project PR than his “client”, BP, by appearing to be a straight shooter: providing frequent updates with as much clarity as the situation allows.  

With the passage of time and lawsuits and congressional hearings, we will learn much more about all the things that went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon rig and how they contributed to this disaster, resulting in the need for a “response project”.  And certainly the response itself will be studied by scholars of all types of disciplines, who will attempt to capture lessons learned from this highly visible, and downright painful, public mess.

But as project managers who may at some point in our careers be called on to lead an almost impossibly troubled project, what lessons can we learn as we watch the situation unfold, from a safe distance and with an increasing benefit of hindsight as each day passes?  And what can we identify that is going right, so we can repeat them on our own troubled projects?

I am eager to hear your observations.  At this point in the response project, I can identify two areas for the “What Went Right” column:

1. Admiral Allen as the leader of the response project definitely goes in the “What Went Right” column.  Not only does he have almost 40 years of service in the Coast Guard, a Master of Public Administration degree from George Washington University and a Master’s degree in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, he was also lead Hurricane Katrina onsite relief efforts in September 2005, and his stewardship of that project was highly regarded.  People in the Gulf know him and respect him.  He has a track record and the perception is that if anyone can get their arms around this mess, it’s him.
2. Another check in the “What Went Right” column goes to adequate resources.  So far, BP has seemed quite willing to foot the bill for the cleanup effort, although many of the business affected need more relief faster.  With time, we will understand exactly who is at fault for what, and BPs willingness to accept responsibility may turn out to be a shrewd PR ploy instead of a demonstration of corporate responsibility.  Nonetheless, right now it’s nice to see resources being committed instead bickering about who will pay for it.  There will be plenty of time for that later…

Please let me know what your thoughts are about the response project, and if you can identify anything else that is going right.

In many respects, the successful planning and management of a turn around project are similar to a normal project.  It requires a new charter, and project plan to evaluate the failings of the first project and define the actions required to correct course.  There are many dimensions to a troubled project, and many things that must be done.  This will not be an article to attempt to discuss all the aspects of how to address a failed or troubled project, but how to address the communications and more specifically – the public relations during the turn around effort.  Through the course of this blog I have written many articles about public relations on projects.  The communications and public relations campaign of a turn around project certainly require the same PR principles that any project does such as:

• Communications message content focused on benefits, helping to keep stakeholders’ focus on the ultimate goal to be achieved at the end of the journey.
• Messages relating not just the information of activities or events, but conveying the value of those events to the business.
• Communicating information promptly, when it is of prime interest and relevance to stakeholders.
• Being aware of the spin or nuance in a message and selecting the appropriate tone of a message that is right for the target audience.

What is different about a troubled project, however, is that unlike a normal project, the project manager does not start with a clean slate and friendly stakeholders.  On a normal project everyone gives you the benefit of the doubt at the beginning.  The project manager can leverage the natural excitement that exists around a new undertaking and create friends of the project.  Once things begin to go awry, all that is lost and stakeholders are now mad.  The recovery PM operates from a position of a PR deficit.  As the public “face” of the project, he/she may no longer have any credibility and this requires extra finesse in the public relations campaign. 

There is no fast or easy way out of the PR deficit position, other than real performance – i.e. actually beginning to make some of the new commitments.  Until that is possible, a certain amount of humility when wearing the “project face” is just part of the role.  What stakeholders tend to want at this point is honest, clear, reliable, complete, straightforward, and prompt information.  As you and your team are performing discovery and identifying priorities, it is important to publicly acknowledge them – even before you may know the solutions.  This helps ease stakeholders’ anxieties that they have been heard and understood.  Your ability to quickly establish the stakeholders’ belief that the information being communicated is reliable and objective establishes credibility. It needs to be complete to insure that quality decisions are derived as a result.   Stakeholders want an open admission of mistakes that were made.  Fortunately, project management gives us a good framework that allows us to discuss such things as lessons learned in a respectful way that retains dignity for the team – especially when combined with process improvements that were implemented as a result of those lessons.  This is important to preserve the morale of the team because the team must carry out the required recovery work. 

A recovery project will probably institute more frequent feedback loops and communications should follow suit.  You cannot afford to let the silence created by a void of information generate panic driven false rumors.  PR during a troubled project therefore becomes very time consuming and it is a good idea to consider appointing a lead who is devoted to managing PR and frequent, prompt communications while the implementation team focuses on resolving issues and carrying out the work.

But what if the stakeholders themselves are the problem?  As described in the ESI International white paper entitled “Saving Troubled Projects”, one of the first things that must be discovered is project history and sensitivities.  As with any project, having a strong supporting sponsor with the appropriate level of seniority and credibility is essential for success.  This sends a clear message to stakeholders that this work is of importance.  The recovery project manager must make an effort to understand the political environment the project has operated in.  He/she must fully understand the objectives of the project, as well as the objectives and motivations of the stakeholders and where those may have been in conflict.  The sponsor should be leveraged to handle stakeholders whose motivations may be at cross purposes with the goals and objectives stated in the charter. 

In summary, a recovery project manager must use all the public relations tools employed on normal projects to an even greater degree on a troubled project to keep stakeholders eyes on the prize as the team rights the ship back on course.