Making Friends and Alliances

  Making Friends and Alliances
If you are hired for or assigned to an ongoing project, the best advice I
can offer is to first conduct an audit of the project. The audit should at
least cover scope, budget, schedule, and customer opinion. Determine
if there are any specific issues plaguing the project and who or what
has been involved with these issues. Document your findings. The
thing you want to do is to establish a starting point from which you are
considered responsible. Whether or not you present these findings to
your management is a political choice. You must make that judgment.
When you move into a new position, you need to do two things:
listen and exhibit confidence. By listening, I mean just that. Talk to
those who have been with the project for a while and understand the
dynamic of the project and its strengths and weaknesses. You are likely
to get some conflicting views, so be careful in sorting out the data. By
confidence, I don’t mean cockiness, I mean confidence. You get confidence
by knowledge and performance. You must understand what your
new position is all about and then apply your past knowledge and experience
to that situation. Once you have a good feel for that, you should
look for alliances to establish. Hopefully, you have been there for a few
days and have had your eyes open to see who knows what and who
claims they do. They most certainly fall into two different piles, and
you must be able to separate them. Your purpose in making friends and
alliances is to get the job done. If you are at a high enough level, you
may bring some staff with you. However, unless you are at the director
level or above, you are probably on your own. Remember, whenever
you select your friends and alliances to be a part of your team or to
support your team, you are not selecting someone to drink beer with.
You are selecting people that will make or break your project and your
career by their performance. Select them carefully.
Before you start to select your people and make allies, keep your
eyes open for high performers to create a core team. Once you have
confidence in a core team and they in you, start selecting the next levels
of people for your team. Consider group interviewing using the Targeted
Selection Process. The core team members will have been there
for a while and will have more insight into who are the performers and
who are not. This strategy just makes your initial job easier. Now you
only need to select a few key people, and they will help you fill out the
team.
It is usually a good idea to work with your core team and to keep
TLFeBOOK
Getting Settled 181
the project team member selection confidential until the time is right
to make the information public. At this time, all the kinks regarding
proficiency and availability have been worked out and your selection
process appears to be smooth and complete. For your first team selection,
it is not unusual to conduct interviews with the potential team
members, much as you would if you were hiring them. All this presumes
you have the latitude to make these selections. Interestingly,
even though you may not have been told you have this latitude, you
can discuss it with your boss. I did this once, and the reason I had not
been given that latitude is that no one thought of it before. When I
discussed it with my new boss, he agreed, and away we went. Of course
you need to read your new boss. It’s a good idea to do your homework
and find out the nature of your new boss before taking on a position.
He or she can just as easily hand you your head as agree with you.