For most of us, chocolate is a delicious food that, regardless of what age we are, we would enjoy eating most of the time. Today I want to share an approach which can be useful for most businesses.
It does not matter the size of businesses. This approach can be useful when you deliver your services or products through launching projects.
I called it “Pieces of Chocolate”, but you might have other names for it and I would be happy if you could share them with me.
Nowadays, stakeholder/customer satisfaction is one of the most important factors to be successful in a business. We know that the Customer Chief Officer (CCO) is more important than other C-Levels for now because market competition is tighter in comparison with the past and market targets are defined based on customer requests.
If we want to meet the point above, we need to execute a project based on a consecutive set of results. And these results must be VALUABLE for our stakeholders.
Unfortunately, we still observe project teams that spend a lot of time and effort on their project or project’s stages. They try to develop internal artefacts, instead of focusing on being results-driven. Therefore, it is clear to see that business stakeholders (e.g. clients) do not desire to support a project, they have negative views or do not believe the project outcomes.
As we know there are various approaches and frameworks for this purpose such as agile approaches, iterative incremental development, etc. They all insist on this content that we should execute a project as small chunks and each chunk must be provide business value in line with the project objectives.
“Pieces of chocolate” is a term that I use for this purpose. We can look at our project results (for each chunk) as pieces of chocolate that these pieces are delicious and encourage business stakeholders to trust the project team and wait for more results. When people taste your yummy chocolate that you create and happy with that, they will trust you and would like to wait for more.
But I suppose at least three main elements are important to be successful in this journey. There are:
– Communication:
This is the main element of working with others. Almost 90% of a project manager’s time spends for that! But this element must be defined clearly and well and having a project management communication plan is vital for this purpose. When people inform correctly and just enough about what is going on in a project, they will be more positive. Will not they? Remember that developing and executing a communication plan BOTH are important! Based on several types of research on different projects, stakeholder communication has a big impact on the project outcomes. So, be careful!
– Collaboration:
All of us know that teamwork is important. It helps people to involve in different stages of a work, share their ideas and opinions and feel having commitments to outcomes. When we involve business stakeholders in a project, it has several benefits for us such as they can see progress of a project, they can understand project challenges, we will be informed about changes that will happen in business, they collaborate in several parts of the project so getting sign off at the end is much easier and we can also get feedback before moving further. But to be successful in this element, we need to manage stakeholders very well. So, using stakeholder management techniques are really useful to be successful here. REMEMBER! We need to have positive stakeholders (clients) AND try to move negative ones to neutral/positive people. I know it is not easy, but that is a fact!
– Presentation:
In addition to the above items, I believe presentation is a very important element as well. Why? because wrapping pieces of chocolate is an important factor to encourage people licking and tasting them. So, we need to work on presenting project results very well. It must be happening based on the project stages and level of knowledge of business stakeholders.
In conclusion, I know we have different terms for all of the items above, but I have collected them under the “Pieces of chocolate” term. We also need to consider, all elements above have dependencies between each other and we need to mention them when we want to satisfy the project stakeholders. So, do all your best (as a team) to create delicious pieces of chocolate and sell them in right place and time.