A couple of months ago, I took the role of the project manager for a challenging project in a global enterprise. This was my first endeavor as a project manager in a global corporation with a global team rolling out a recent technology with potential changes on the business in more than thirty countries. As I was assigned to this role, I realized how challenging this role could be. Especially, as I realized that the main stakeholders were unhappy with the outputs and experienced the tension we had in the meetings. To tackle these challenges, I directly requested support from an experienced project manager within the same corporation. He is someone who managed several projects successfully and understands the culture of the organization. The best person to be my coach was an established project manager that I worked with in an earlier project. He ran the project successfully and smoothly. After alignment with my manager, I approached him and asked him to support me through a bi-weekly or monthly call. Additionally, I approached my colleagues from the Agile Centre of Excellence during the lunch breaks to reflect with them from time to time.
In the following lines, I will describe the steps we took that changed that enabled the project to have a momentum of delivery and a more satisfied stakeholder:
- One-to-one Interview with the important stakeholders: This was the first recommendation from my coach. I prepared around ten questions and reached out to the stakeholders with more power. This step enabled me to understand how the main players are perceiving the project, what are their expectation and why are they disappointed. I collected their thoughts and presented them to the project team, to show the need to change. It was also a great chance to start building a personal connection with the main stakeholders and show an understanding of their needs.
- Getting support from the main sponsor through bi-weekly alignment in a structured way: To start changing, I needed to have support from the management. My strategy was to have a bi-weekly meeting with the project sponsor and discuss the following points: (Done since the last meeting, risks, and Issues, to do in the coming two weeks, where I need support). This alignment helped me understand the needs of the sponsor and kept the sponsor engaged. IT also showed him the willingness to change from the whole project team.
- Define the scope through clear features/user stories – Work packages/tasks with clear statuses. At the start point, there were tens of meetings/weekly. These tasks were also run in parallel without any tracking and with less reaching final done. No clear scope, nor clear structure of the scope/tasks. The product owner and I decided to divide the project into work packages/tasks you can also say Features/user stories with clear agreed-upon statuses. This enabled us directly to define the overall project scope and detailed status, delivering more transparency. The statuses of the work packages were also part of the reporting and an enabler to communicate issues and risks objectively to stakeholders and steerco.
- Get the focus using scrum with monthly sprints, Kanban board and daily stand-up. The thought behind implementing scrum was to:a- Keep the team focused on delivering 6-8 features every month.b- To measure the velocity of the team, as this will enable better planning and consequently clearer communication of expectations. c- Having a Kanban board in Jira enabled us to ensure that we only do the topics aligned with the product owner and only what is agreed with her. Additionally, it allowed us to track where we have blockages and where the team needs support. d- Running daily stand-up and acting as a servant leader in this meeting enabled the team to focus on their development tasks and to escalate other issues to the scrum master or product owner. e- Finally, working in a global environment, having all changes documented in Jira and Confluence enabled the team to have a better understanding of each other, as verbal language might not be enough for people with less language skills or speaking English not as a mother tongue.
- Reducing WIP: As we started to use Kanban, we realized that the team was working on more than fifty features at the same time. We shifted the team goal from working to accomplishing. The features were reduced to eight features per sprint to deliver them by the end of each sprint. In case these were not delivered, we needed to present in an objective way what blocked us and what support is needed from our SteerCo.
- Using agreed-upon KPIs: We used two KPIs:a- One KPI focusing on the progress for outputs.b. b- another KPI reflecting the effect on the organization (Outcome).These KPIs helped the team to keep focused to deliver faster than previous months. Additionally, they helped the team to understand the whole progress of the project from two perspectives in a quantitative way.
- Learning from successes and failures: We ran Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives to enable:a- Better teamwork and communication among the project team.b- Improve our processes.
- Taking ownership of the features: One of the great benefits of the Kanban board in addition to controlling WIP, was promoting the ownership of the tasks. Every team member assigned a task had ownership of this issue until reaching a clear resolution. Team members were empowered to have face-to-face meetings or video calls with the different stakeholders to clarify the open issues and reach a decision in an efficient way rather than drafting long emails that can be interpreted in separate ways leaving people frustrated in many times. These meetings had to have a clear purpose and agenda. The owner of the topic facilitated these meetings and supported the participants in reaching a mutual understanding and agreement.
- Establish a communication plan and engage with stakeholders in one-to-one calls if needed. To get the stakeholders engaged and willing to support the project, we initiated simple communication plans based on sharing the project status, open issues, main decisions, risks, and roadmap with all interested and influencing stakeholders. We did this monthly. Thus, for regions, in which the project was much more active we sent the updates twice a month. In the regions where we needed extra support, we held one weekly status meeting to express the support needed concretely.
- Align the business case with the current organization strategy. As the project was initiated, its main goal was to have a single point of truth for the data and reporting benefits to support the higher management making decisions. This business case was not motivating anyone or the SteerCo to continue with the project. We had to link the project to the latest strategy goals of the enterprise regarding efficiency and cost savings. Luckily, one of the indirect effects of the project was reducing costs through cutting unneeded licenses. This benefit was never thought of before. Do not ask me why! We discovered this while communicating with one of the elegant target application owners in the enterprise. We reinvented the business case behind this benefit in addition to cutting the costs of the manual work for maintaining the data. This meant of course, we needed to prioritize the features accordingly and present the outcome/benefit behind every feature we wanted to implement, which we did. Communicating the new business case and benefits to the stakeholders created a huge wave of support for the project.
- Achieving two fast wins and celebrating them. To prove to our team, steerco, and the different stakeholders, that we are on the right track now, we needed to find three features with a significant effect and drive them to success. We were able to deliver two of them in an amazing time. The third one was not delivered because of external issues that were communicated transparently. These two fast wins improved the reliability of our project team, vision, and processes and helped us get more engagement from the different and important stakeholders/countries. They requested to be part of this successful project.
Finally, we linked these changes to the values of our organization and focused on the four values (Push limits, take customers further, one team one goal, play fair with people). Having established values among us as a team served as a compass to judge our behavior and decisions whenever we needed a compass. We reminded us of our values in our daily stand-ups in the beginning and the retrospectives. The final result was saving the organization more than 400k€ without any employee release and only through cutting unneeded licensing costs.
My final question to you my reader: What would you consider the most important action(s) and why? Happy to listen and discuss.
