Day 47 — Stakeholder series 2/7: “Success Criteria”
When running a project, how do we know we’re making meaningful progress? How do we know we achieve the intended goal? How do we convince our stakeholders we did our job? Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” In which he means that unless we can define the success criteria, we can’t truly manage our progress because we might be “one step forward, two steps back”.
“you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” — Peter Drucker
So how can we define our project success criteria with our stakeholders? What are some simple ways we can quickly adopt and give it a try? I’m sharing 3 tools to might help you find out your project success criteria:
- Newspaper Headline
- Value vs. Outcome
- OKRs
Without further due, let’s explore how these tools can help you & your stakeholders define project success criteria.
Newspaper Headline
This is probably one of the most fun and light weight solutions to help us figure out what the success will look like from stakeholders’ standpoint. During the early conversation with our stakeholders, we can simply ask them: “If the project becomes wildly successful, what would be the newspaper headline look like?“
By asking this simple question, we can see how our stakeholders think of the future project success; specifically, what value they think should be broadcasted to the users? What are some focal points? How grandiose it looks like? Pay attention to the adjectives they choose to use in the headline, and you might find some gems in shaping design principles. For example, “fast”, “effortless”, “comprehensive”, or “safe”.
The theory behind this is “having end state in mind”; having a clear vision help us visualize what the success looks like. With a collective descriptions from multiple stakeholders, we can get a better idea what they’re expecting from the product/service, and what area we should focus our effort for.
If you’re stakeholders are very user driven, they might even mention some details that we never expect. For example, in the “headline”, they might mention the target user groups, a specific feature or two, what market segment it’s competing in, or even how they want to name the product/feature. Although these are not necessarily helping us define success criteria, they are valuable information to validate business assumptions and product direction.
Value & Outcome
Once you get the high-level ideas through the Newspaper Headline exercise, now it’s time to verify your assumptions and balance the conflicting information you gathered. For example, one stakeholder might think “speed” is the most important criteria, while another could think “thoroughness” is what really matters. How do we deal with this type of situation? Let’s find out their value and desired outcome.
The word “value” in a project could mean a lot of different things. For example, business value might be different than customer value, and customer value could be different than user value (think about a baby product, the customers are not the user). Also, value usually has a personal factor in it, you may get very different answers depending on who you ask. For example, a typical answer from engineering team is about performance, efficiency, or some process innovation. On contrary, a typical answer from stakeholders on the business side could be revenue gaining, cost saving, sales increase, user base expansion, etc.
Jeff Gothelf wrote a post analyze how different value could drive different outcome. In the figure above, he layout the relationship between product features, value from outcome, and the impact to business. And in that example, the business impact of “Reduced Cost” is driven by the value/outcome of “Faster Task Completion”, which can help us brainstorm feature ideas like “One-click ordering”.
By breaking down different types of value from desirable outcome, we can better formulate and articulate detailed success criteria. More importantly, these specified outcomes need to be agreed with a larger group so that we’re staying aligned and heading toward the same goal.
OKR
The term OKR stands for Objective and Key Results. It was first introduced in Intel, as a tool, a framework to help formalize not only what we’re trying to achieve, but how we can measure success. OKR consists of two parts: One Objective, and one or more Key Results to verify if the Objective is actually achieved. So how does it work? How do we get the OKRs from our stakeholders? Here’s a simple 3-step process:
- Communicate Objectives: Plan for a workshop and invite your key stakeholders. This could include business sponsor, product manager (or sometimes strategy team), technology lead, sometimes even legal/compliance if in a highly-regulated environment. Give each person/team a poster-size blank paper (e.g. flip chart) and ask them to write down their project/product Objectives.
- Create Key Results: When everyone finishes writing their Objectives, ask each present their Objectives and explain why it’s important to them and their team. Once a round of presentation is done, ask each person/team write down the Key Results. The Key Results should be something that’s measurable in a timely fashion (e.g. quarterly, annually, or by project cadence)
- Socialize Team’s OKRs: Once everyone finishes their Key Results, and them to present to the room and gather feedback.
The benefit of this exercise are two folds. Firstly, it builds empathy and transparency across different functional team, and align the general vision, which later enhance collaboration and communication. Secondly, given these Key Results will eventually become each team’s success criteria, it’s an opportunity for teams to communicate them upfront in the project timeline, so that there’s no confusion what others can expect at the end of the project.
Bonus Tips: Hidden Criteria
Unfortunately we don’t always get to understand all the success criteria through meeting or other forms of formal conversation. At the end of the day, most of the people have some personal interest in project that’s not easily communicated in a formal business setting. How do we get to know these hidden success criteria? Especially from the high-influence stakeholders? Here are 3 simple tips:
- Offline conversation: Some people might not feel comfortable share their personal interest in a group setting. Having an offline conversation gives them a platform to raise their true voice.
- Build relationship: The stronger relationship we have with our stakeholder, the more trust we gain, they are more willing to share what they are really trying to achieve, whether it’s business or personal (and a lot of times they are intertwined). Building reliable relationship is the first step to get to their inner thoughts.
- Go to manager or senior stakeholder: Sometimes we just have no luck to get to know what’s actually going on, especially in a new project or new organization. Our managers or senior stakeholders are great resource to understand strategic goals for the larger team or the firm, which usually is what individual project goals derive from. Having some side conversations might help determine individuals goals in strategic alignment.
Conclusion
- Having clear success criteria help us ensure we’re heading the right way in a right pace;
- Use different tools to get to know how stakeholders define success. More importantly, align them with a strategic goal, so there’s less conflict of interest down the road;
- When we can’t stakeholder’s input directly, try to connect with senior manager to gauge the alignment with larger goals of the organization.
Do you have any tips or tricks you’d like to share in Stakeholder Management? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
