Sustain Effective Communications

In international projects formal communications represent a risk. Every time you get up and make a formal presentation, you are risking quite a bit of the project. People may want to look good at your expense. You risk exposing your lack of knowledge and sensitivity to the culture in a location. Being in a formal presentation may feel threatening to the audience. They may feel that they have to do something. You have to make formal presentations and cannot avoid it. The guideline is:

Make as few formal presentations as possible.

Informal communications are a critical success factor for international projects. You can bring people up-to-date on the status of the project. You can solicit their ideas about issues. You can get support in terms of resources. How do you arrange for informal, casual communications? Planning. Try to get to people in person or by telephone early in the morning in their time zone before they start work. If you can do this in person, run into them casually as they walk into work. Another good idea is to talk to them in the restroom or where they smoke (if they smoke). When people smoke, many tend to open up and talk more frankly and honestly about situations. If you are not a smoker, try to put up with second-hand smoke. These techniques sound crude and sneaky. But they work! For employees, go out where they have their breaks or lunch. Just sit there and listen. Then you can ask questions.

When you communicate with people informally, you should always have these three things ready at all times:

1. Status of the project from their point of view.

2. Issues that are active and unresolved that are of interest to them.

3. A story or anecdote from the project that might be amusing or interesting to them.

Give them the status. Then if there is interest shown, move to issues. Put the story into your discussion when discussing the issues. On issues follow these guidelines:

• Have three issues ready.

• The first issue is a very small one that be disposed of quickly. This establishes a pattern of success in the meeting for dealing with issues. People are happy.

• The second issue is a major political or business issue for which there is no immediate solution. They cannot give you one. They feel bad, because they could not help you.

• With the pattern of success in dealing with the first issue and the guilt of the second issue, you can now discuss the third issue. This is the one that you really need a decision. They will tend to make decisions more readily.

Never, ever, go to someone with one issue. They will feel that you are putting their back up against the wall. You will not likely get the result you desire. Also, by going in with a group of issues, you show that you are top of the project from technical, business, and political perspectives.

There is also the item in informal communications of the number of times that a manager brought up an issue to you first. What is this? If a manager calls you up or comes to you with an issue before you brought it up with them, you failed in communicating. Why? Because they were taken by surprise; surprises tend to be unpleasant. The person may think that you are not on top of your project. They may now feel that they cannot trust you as the only source of information about the project.

Now let’s turn to the structure of the presentation. In a traditional approach you would present the background of the project and lead into the purpose, scope, schedule, cost, etc. This is too boring and the wrong type of presentation. You must be more dynamic in your presentation. Here is an outline:

• State the purpose of the project from a technical, business, and political perspective. This will indicate to the audience that you are sensitive to politics.

• Go into both the benefits of the project as well as what will happen if the project is not undertaken or if it is deferred. Many projects are approved because of the negative consequences of doing nothing. Capitalize on the fear factor. This is what happens in television commercials. Your car will fall apart if you don’t have the brakes replaced or repaired.

• Discuss the scope of the project and potential issues. Issues seem to be negative. They are not here. You are warning management long in advance of some of the potential problems that lie ahead. Everyone likes to be warned in advance. You also show your qualifications and experience as well as demonstrating that you are aware of the issues and have thought about these. Get management and the audience in general to participate in the meeting to discuss how issues will be addressed in general by using one issue as an example.

• Talk about how the business will change after the project is completed. Here you can give sample transactions or examples of how work will be performed. This will get the audience excited since you are moving beyond the project work. You are showing how the benefits will be realized. This is also a positive point in the presentation to offset the negative tone of issues.

• Discuss the cost, resources, and schedule for the project. Notice that there is a break between the benefits and costs. This is by intent. The benefits get them excited. The issues and scope discussion got their involvement. Now you have some discussion of the schedule. By combining the schedule and resources with the costs, you are combining negative things (costs) with positive ideas of how long it will take and what resources are needed. People will tend to discuss the positive part more.

• Close the presentation with a list of specific actions that need to be taken to develop the plan, line up resources, etc. Notice that you are closing with specific small actions for them to approve. You are not asking for the moon. You will come back later with the project plan for their final approval. By breaking this up, you will be more politically successful in getting the concept of the project approved. Momentum will be gained so that it will be hard for people later to turn down the plan if it follows the concept.

How do you determine if you are successful? Well, did your action items get approved? However, you also want to follow up by going back to some of the audience and getting their reactions and thoughts. They will pick up tones, nuances, feelings, etc., that you missed because you were concentrating on the presentation.

Data collection in any project is a key activity. In international projects, you often have to collect similar information in multiple locations. What is an effective and efficient approach to get this information? Tradition says interviewing. Put together some key questions and go out and get the answers—a solid academic approach. Unfortunately, this fails in the real world. In interviews there can be many problems, including:

• The person gives you false leads or “red herrings.” This misleads you and you take a wrong direction—costing time and money.

• People respond to the questions even if they do not know the answers since they do not want to appear to be dumb.

• Many managers being interviewed don’t remember the details of the work since they have not performed the work in many years.

• They may get a number of people in the room for the interview. The quiet ones who know the answers do not speak up.

• In many interviews people often will tell you what they think you want to hear.

With all of these problems, should you drop the idea of doing interviews? No. Interviews are important in many cultures because you have to get through the levels and layers of middle management to get down to where the project will really be done. Interviews are then essential, but you cannot rely on them.

What should you go in with for an interview? You have the project concept or status. Discuss what is going on now from their point-of-view. You are updating them on the project. This provides them with information. Do the interview alone. If several people interview someone, they will feel outnumbered and may not talk openly. Go into the interview with 3–4 questions. Some of these might include:

Many international projects deal with business processes. After these interviews, you seek to get down to where the work is being performed as quickly as possible. Remember the X-Files television show—“The truth is out there.” Here it is down in the detail.

Team communications here means communications between the project leaders and individual team members and communications among team members. There are three general areas where project leaders approach individual team members. One is status—covered later. A second is to discuss a problem or opportunity. The third is just to see how people are doing. Here are some guidelines for project leader–team member communications:

• Encourage individual and pairs of team members to come to you with issues and problems. Always be open to problems. This avoids very unpleasant surprises later.

• To find out about issues, use the third area of contact where you ask them how things are going to get issues out on the table.

• After you ask how things are going, find out what else they are working on. This will indicate to you if they are experiencing being pulled in different directions and being subjected to pressures from their other work. Then ask them what you can do to help.

• Don’t accept at face value what one team member says. Always look for validation and another point of view from the other team member that is working with them. Do not attempt to do this right away; it will appear that you do not trust them. Wait a few days and then casually contact the other team member.

• Do not attempt to be fair in reaching all team members the same number of times in a given period. There is no time for this in most international projects. There is too much to do. Instead, the project leaders should concentrate on areas of the project where there are issues and risk and the areas of the international project that are critical.

• Keep a log of the contacts with the team members. Update the issues database as you uncover more issues.

It will then be easier to monitor the work and have some confidence that things will go right.

Another guideline is to have the team members share their experiences in working together in the lessons learned meetings. In that way, other team members might pick up some useful tips in working together.

In many companies project meetings can be characterized by the following:

• The meeting is held at the same time each week.

• The meeting is held in the same location.

• Most of the meeting is devoted to the team updating people on status.

This approach fails for a number of reasons. First, in international projects you cannot get together easily. So people tend to use voice conference calls. People find the meetings boring since they are often interested in their own status, but not that of others in the team working on things that do not affect them. Third, the project leaders’ only power is that of timing. Project leaders do not, after all, control people or money. They have the use of these things, but they do not control them. When the meetings are always held at the same time and place, the project leaders give up their power. Thus, even if the project is in trouble, people are meeting in the same way. What is the impression given to the team? Even though the project leaders say the project is in trouble, it is really not. “

Otherwise, why are we meeting in the same way?”

There is a better approach for meeting on international projects. Follow these guidelines and you will have more success.

In general, try to have two meetings on issues to one on lessons learned. Gather status on the project ahead of the meetings. At the start of the meeting, summarize the status of the project. In an issues meeting, try to address three issues. The people for the first two issues should be present. After the first issue is covered, then these people leave and get the individuals for the third issue. This keeps the meeting going and it minimizes the waste of time for the meeting. Why three issues? This is a number that you can get through in a time of say one hour. Never try to resolve issues in the meeting. This would put too much pressure on the people and will likely lead to bad decisions. In many different cultures, issues are never solved in meetings. They are resolved in one-on-one get-togethers after the meeting. That is the model to follow. You also avoid confrontation in the meetings.

How do you discuss an issue? Present the issue to the group and give some background. To test people’s understanding of the issue, discuss what will happen if the issue is not solved. This gets people involved in the conversation and is not forcing them to think of solutions.

Who takes the minutes of the meeting? YOU DO! Whoever takes the notes of a meeting controls the truth. Do not forget this basic point. This is true even if you are highest ranking person in the room. Write up the notes of the meeting within one hour after the meeting. How should you organize the notes? Here is a suggested approach that has worked:

• Identify the issue and the impact if it is not addressed;

• Summarize the potential actions that were covered;

• Summarize the decision and what comes next—agreed upon action items;

• Make sure that, with few exceptions, that all action items are to be followed up on within 48 hours of the meeting.

Informal communications are a key to management communications. You have to not only stay in touch with the managers who oversee the project, but also with the line managers who control the individual team members in each location. This group of people is very important. Here are some guidelines:

• Bring the line manager up-to-date on the status of the project overall.

• Zoom in on the contribution that their people are making to the project. This will give them a good feeling.

• Ask them about what issues they are facing. This will show that you are sensitive to what they are doing.

• If they present an issue, then try to help them. If it is appropriate, make the issue one of the issues for the project. Remember though that you are politically showing that you care. You are not trying to do their job.

• If they indicate that they need the person back from the team, try to see what you can do. Maybe, you can find someone else from the department or division. Always anticipate that they want the person back. If they never bring this subject up, then they may feel that they can get along without this person. This may give you some clues about how important they are in their own organization.

For tasks that are jointly assigned, try to get the status and information from the two people assigned to the tasks together. This may mean a meeting or conference call.

In collecting status, you should always gather status from the people working on critical tasks first. This will give you more time to deal with issues and understand them. After this, you can use this information when you gather information from other team members. Remember that gathering status on a project is a cumulative, yet sequential activity. Take advantage of this by using the information gathered earlier in later conversations.

At the bottom of the chart there are a number of items. First, you are stating what milestones were achieved. These are stated in business terminology so that the managers can understand. The same is true for upcoming milestones. Another item is a list of critical outstanding issues. Do you provide more detail than this as to status, etc.? No. You want to use the status report politically so that managers will then contact you about the issues. You are using the status report to move ahead on the issues. This is why this template for status reporting is quite useful.

Issues are a major part of international projects. When an issue first surfaces to you, the form and nature of the issue tend to be fuzzy. You don’t know if you have all of the information. You don’t know if you are dealing with a problem or a symptom of a problem. Yet, you want to inform management informally of the potential issue so that they are not taken by surprise.

Communicating about issues over time and distance is difficult. Therefore, you seek to have an organized approach that is followed not only by the project leaders, but also by the team members. What are your goals in issue communications?

• Management hears about the issue first from you.

• There is a gradual buildup toward action on an issue; you do not want snap decisions in most international settings.

• You want to deal with several related issues at one time.

• Most of the time when you communicate issues, you are not seeking actions and decisions. Rather you are attempting to get understanding by them.

After first communicating about an issue, you then keep the manager informed. From initial symptoms and fuzziness, you present an increased picture of clarity and focus. After there is agreement on a decision and actions, you should communicate back to the manager exactly what was agreed to—to avoid misunderstandings.

The communications doesn’t end here. The managers who were involved in the decisions deserve to be told from you what happened. They want to know if they made the right decision. If the feedback comes from other people, it will tend to be a murky picture related to some side effect of an action— not very reassuring. Go back to the managers and communicate the results as well as the events of what happened in the project after the effects of the actions.

• At the start of the international project, identify the types of documents that will be produced.

• For each type, make sure that you have an outline for the document.

• Try to put examples of these documents from previous projects on the network. Include good and bad examples. Expunge the names of people and organizations. This will give the team members models of what is expected. We do this in our teaching. Each quarter we often put past projects on the Web or network for students to review. Since each project is different, they cannot just reuse what has been done before.

• Discuss guidelines and expectations for each document.

• Discuss how documents will be reviewed.

From experience there are some additional guidelines for preparing the documents. Do not send team members away to work on a document. They might come back weeks later with something unacceptable. That is too risky and there may be insufficient time to redo the document. Have the team members produce an outline for you in a short time. Then they can submit more detailed outlines later. The document grows and there will be no unpleasant surprises. This method is called the method of successive refinement. It has been employed in both teaching and projects for over two decades—always with good results.

There are many signs of problems that you should be on the lookout for. Here are some of the common ones:

• If things are quiet in the project, assume that things are not going well. Assume that there are issues. This is similar to that of children. If your child is very quiet playing in their room, then you can assume that they are getting into mischief.

• If you begin the project and have identified documents as milestones without outlines or templates, then there will likely be problems. The team members do not know what you are expecting. This makes it more difficult to estimate the duration of the work. As a result, they will tend to underestimate the work.

• As a project leader, after resolving issues, communications is your number two activity. You must often force yourself to get up and go out to find out what is going on. This can be a struggle, because some days the last thing you want to know about is another issue. But get out of that chair

1. Look in the literature on the Web to examine if the cause of failure in projects was a breakdown in communications.

2. Apply the communications score cards to existing projects