Who the hell are you and why the hell are you here?
Big room full of people, big screen TV capturing faraway randoms displaying silent conviviality, maybe a fruit or bagel tray, a PowerPoint glitters from a giant, frayed pulldown A/V screen. The smell of sweat overwhelms the tepid coffee aroma from the greasy donut box. Project kickoff. Who the fuck are all these people?
It took me a long time to have the courage to ask people in a meeting what the hell they were doing there. They were often wearing suits and wielded unnatural sway over my financial security; so, I’m sure you can understand my hesitation. But once I realized that most executives have no idea why they are anywhere at all and asked them, they appreciated someone letting them skip class and go back to inappropriately tweeting from their office.
I’m not saying you should bring an FBI grade flashlight and interrogate each attendee (more on attendee interrogation coming soon!). I am saying that you are the project manager and as such, you are the person ultimately responsible for appropriate use of people and resources in the project. You want to mack it up and set the tone for the entire project? Tell someone you’re not ready for them yet and you’ll let them know when they’re up. Watch them silently until they pack up and leave. Bonus points if you can work in the phrase, “Here’s a quarter for your trouble. Buy yourself a cup of soup.”
Some people will talk about project team types and categorize them by structure like virtual, self-managed, what have you. Others will talk about project member types in terms of roles titling members like Project Sponsor, Executive Sponsor, Business Analyst, blah blah blah kotzen. These people are Self-Involved Bullshit Artists (SIBAs). SIBAs don’t belong on your team.
You can broadly break down your project teams into Deciders and Actors. In very small project teams or in projects that are broken down into many, small project teams, some person or persons are going to be both at the same time but never for their own tasks.
Deciders are all the people that if you gave them a task wouldn’t know the Google search words to figure how to start, i.e., management or clients, but they know what they have to have to be successful and their say is final. Given the proper decision support tools and information, they can competently approve or reject the work product at each milestone or in response to unexpected changes. Deciders tend to be narrowly focused on component parts of a project. For example, there may be a person whose sole decision responsibility relates to office supplies for the project team and ensures that costs are appropriately billed to the project cost code. They will also be the ones to order the supplies as part of that oversight and decision responsibility. But she cannot approve an increase in office supply budget because, um, who watches the watcher, eh?
Stakeholders are another group that may pop up here and there in meetings and ass-chewing sessions. Stakeholders may or may not be deciders but they can kill every decision in a project with little effort. Stakeholders are people like the client, your boss, the CFO or the salesperson. (If you actually have a salesperson as a stakeholder, you are so stupid, you should check to make sure you aren’t currently on fire and just don’t know it. Follow the smoke.) If you are the Lead PM, managing stakeholders and stakeholders’ expectations is likely to be the majority of your daily activities. For everyone else, let Lead PM manage the stakeholder, stay focused on your own success path.
Actors are the people whose names will be next to tasks and will provide updates on task completion to you. People like integrators and 3rd parties, technical leads, business leads, operational support, etc. Generally, if you have to assign anything to them with a due date, they are an actor (at least for that task).
So, how do you keep track of everyone? You can search Amazon until Jesus comes again for project management tools and software to do this. They do things like create network visualizations so you can see interaction coverage and other such esoteric bullshit. Honestly, all you need to document are the three constraints on that person: Who/what controls them, who/what they control, full-time/part-time/contract/salaried/hourly. Let me explain by example.
Which is worse? The CEO is a stakeholder and wants to be present at all decision meetings or the contract resource hired to temporarily bridge a skill gap in the project team? What if I told you the contract resource is part-time? If you picked the CEO, check for fire again. The CEO wants success to the exclusion of all sanity which makes her own risk. That part-time contract hire who is already established as a necessary outside expert is a huge project risk because if they cannot complete their tasks, they have near-zero downside to terminating the contract and disappearing like a preacher when the strip club is raided. If they really are some kind of expert, you can also end up on the bottom of their priority list if a bigger consulting gig comes along.
Knowing what controls them and what they control tells you where the chokepoints might be. I literally make a 3x5 card for each project member after the kickoff and I write their name in the middle and along the top I write the list of people that control them. Along the bottom I write the people or things they control. When I finish, I sort them by top heavy, then bottom heavy. If a person has a lot of names above them, they’re a huge risk because those names might contradict each other and create disruption inadvertently. If they have a lot of names below them, you have to adjust your bus factor for the project accordingly. If that person gets sick or goes on vacation and delays approvals or decisions they can have huge cascade impacts on all downstream tasks.
When you have those cards, you can then create a simple spreadsheet that outlines accountability chains. Why do that at all though? When a problem arises, you want to be able to quickly and without thinking, go right to the person who can pull the most powerful level to make the resource successful. Make sure you have their emails, phone numbers, and social links. You cannot afford to wait for contact info when the project has going full speed but the bridge is out and someone’s gotta start building fast. But just day to day, you need to be able to quickly identify who to update when changes happen.
Be sure you are reporting and updating your team according to their role type (Decider or Actor). Actors don’t care about the general state of other approval steps. Deciders don’t generally need to know the completion status of discrete tasks. Knowing the difference helps you target communication and reduce confusion and increase clarity. If you don’t get rid of the SIBAs, they jeopardize your efficiencies by requiring over-reporting to everyone or requiring more frequent updates than are necessary or feasible so that they can show off the progress more often. Save them from themselves. Know who’s on your team and what they can do. Then tell only the people who need to know only when they need to know it so the team stays unperturbed and focused.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. — Art of War
Making sure you know who is who and why they’re on the team is the first step to better risk management.
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