How to LEAD your Project's Purpose and People for the Best Outcomes
The purpose of this blog post is to provide an overview of the LEAD part of the MPM model. LEAD is about leading the project to achieve a specific purpose and ensure it is always moving in that direction; and it also about leading the people involved with helping to achieve that purpose.
The LEAD part includes Motive and People
Project Management is Leading the Project and People to Achieve a Specific Purpose
Buying a vehicle is similar to a small, personal project. If you followed the steps to INITIATE your project, you are taking a route that greatly increases your likelihood of project success.
Look at this blog post if you want a refresher on the components of the charter.
Look at this blog post for insights into why a charter has your back.
Just imagine that in a couple of months, you are the proud owner of a new vehicle, having a celebratory drink with your vehicle expert friend who helped you, and you find yourself saying, “that was a very successful little project.”
The daily and weekly habits that you’ll form using the advice from this blog are the key to that future success.
First some context. Remember, there are five parts to the model: INITIATE, LEAD, CONTROL, PLAN, and TRANSITION. INITIATE and TRANSITION are the pieces that bookend your project—the very beginning and the shift back to normal operations.
You’ve started your project, so you’re now in the middle three sections. These contain the daily and weekly habits to successful project management, and the pieces involved with managing your project through its implementation: LEAD, CONTROL, and PLAN.
This blog post focuses on LEAD. Read about INITIATE here.
Small daily and weekly habits lead to success
LEAD is where we begin developing the daily and weekly habits that will help you manage the project to a successful conclusion using the least amount of your time.
CONTROL and PLAN also have daily and weekly habits that we cover in those blog posts as well.
It’s important to do the daily tasks, and you can keep them short and sweet, so that they’re easier to turn into habits.
One of our goals at Simple PM Strategies is to show you the way to do Project Management using the least amount of your time.
Staying on top of things by doing some small daily and weekly activities will help you make sure that you’re using your project management time effectively. You’ll avoid major issues that can take more of your time to resolve if you’re up to speed with your project and proactive with problem management. Make sense?
The next section is a quick one-page review of the MPM model to refresh the context of where we are and then we’ll dive into the details of LEAD.
In the breakdown of LEAD, there will be a section per project management item. Each section explains the project item, then gives examples through the personal vehicle purchase project, and finishes with some suggested daily and weekly habits.
MPM Model Quick Review
In our project management MPM model, there are 5 parts:
- INITIATE, which involves creating an overview of your project before you get started,
- LEAD, which looks at why you are doing the project and the people that are going to help and be affected by it,
- CONTROL, which is where you shape and manage the outcomes of the project,
- PLAN, which looks at how everything fits together and timing, and
- TRANSITION, which covers how your project outcomes continue to work after the project is done.
Each part of the model always ties into the other, but the label for the part tells us our intent at this point, indicates what aspect we are emphasizing, and the lens through which we are looking at our project.
The Project Management MPM model has 5 parts
What is in LEAD?
LEAD answers the general questions of “Why?” and “Who?”, which for managing projects are “Motive” and “People”.
“Motive” contains four items, each covered in their own section in this blog post:
“People” has five items, each covered in their own section in this blog post:
A vehicle purchase is a practical example of a project.
Motive
The “motive” in your project answers the question of “why” you are doing the project: your overarching reason and motivation.
The components to Motive help clarify and document that reason. The purpose statement succinctly states the project goal, the description provides support detail, as do the assumptions, which clarify what is expected for the purpose to be achieved, and the risks are potential hurdles to reaching the goal.
“Why” is Your Motive
1. Purpose
The purpose and description are stated in your project charter and once approved by your stakeholders, stays constant. Keep your purpose short: one or two statements at most.
Purpose for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
In your vehicle purchase project that we started in the INITIATE article, the project purpose may be simply to buy a new vehicle to replace your old one because your current one is about to die and that would leave you without a vehicle.
Figuring out what you want to communicate to your stakeholders, and the decisions you will be making yourself, will be key in writing a good Purpose statement.
The purpose statement can be narrow, identifying elements of the solution. It can also be broader, leaving the project to explore a larger set of options early in the project.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and each affects the project costs, time and effort in a different way, so the purpose should be chosen carefully. The blog post at this link goes into the narrow versus broad discussion in a little more detail and includes examples for the vehicle purchase project.
Your vehicle purchase project can have a very open or very specific purpose
Weekly Habits for Purpose
Your purpose does not need weekly updates, but you can review it every few weeks if you need a grounding in case the project is struggling to determine the best decision amongst some critical options early on.
A quick review of your project purpose at team meetings helps ensure that you’re only focused on the essential steps to reach your destination, rather than shiny objects you might encounter along the way.
2. Description
The description section contains background that supports the project statement.
If you need to add supplementary Purpose details for your stakeholders, then put that in the Description section.
The Description can also contain a sub-section best titled as Background Information, which provides project context for the stakeholders, letting them see the motivations and rationales that lead to the project.
Description for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
In your vehicle purchase project, you can add the following example points to start your Background section:
Background
- The current vehicle is 10 years old and has 300,000 miles
- Repairs in the last nine months include major, expensive parts, such as the drive train
Weekly Habits for Description
The description should not change after your stakeholders approve it, but review of the Target State description can be helpful to ensure you are achieving the vision that was presented to the stakeholders.
If you do change the purpose or description, your charter will need re-approval or another review by your stakeholders. Get a habit of reviewing the purpose and description for five minutes every other or every third week, to ensure you are on target with what was discussed with your Stakeholders.
3. Assumptions
When you state your project Purpose, you set a destination, and in order to be successful in reaching that destination you have to assume certain things are true.
Assumptions articulate the boundary conditions that are necessary for your project’s success.
Missed Assumptions can lead us into problems later
Stakeholders reviewing your project charter will bring up more assumptions, which can be added to your list to make it more comprehensive.
The assumptions can also assist with understanding risks that can hinder your project success, because anything that affects your assumptions can introduce a risk. We’ll discuss this more in the Risks section.
For steps in managing and updating assumptions and some examples, see this article.
Assumptions for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
Examples of assumptions that can be listed for your vehicle purchase project include:
- The interest rate for financing will be constant over the time period for your vehicle purchase project
- Your credit rating for financing stays constant or goes up, but does not go down
- The models and years you are considering are available at the dealers that are within the preferable radius from your home
Weekly Habits for Assumptions
Assumptions don’t necessarily need a weekly review, unless the project is in the midst of some critical challenges and is reviewing current directions.
Reviewing assumptions takes less than 5 minutes and it can be worth a review every few weeks as part of the review of other charter items such as Purpose and Description.
Assumptions can change and require updating but not necessarily affect the project objectives or purpose. If they do, then a review and re-approval by stakeholders may be necessary.
4. Risks
Risks are potential impediments to achieving your project purpose. They exist because of your project purpose statement.
In other words, by stating a purpose or goal, and the assumptions about what has to be in place to reach that goal, a number of conditions or issues come to mind that could prevent that purpose or goal from being reached. These are your risks.
So, they start out as potential issues and if they are significant enough, they are formulated into risks which have to be monitored or reviewed frequently to see if they are in danger of occurring. If they are in danger of occurring, steps are then followed to mitigate, or reduce or eliminate, the impact of that occurrence.
During INITIATE an initial list of risks is created in the charter. Here is a link to an article that discusses creating risks during INITIATE.
As the project progresses the list of risks is monitored, and some can be removed, or more added. It is a dynamic list that needs a weekly review.
Think of risks as issues, that if they come to fruition, cause problems that have a negative impact, so it is beneficial to identify steps to mitigate them in case they do occur.
Risks can be listed as statements using the formula above. There is more detail about how to do that in this blog article.
Communication is key here because you might need help from your stakeholders to mitigate the risks. Therefore, it is important that they are clearly understood and shared, frequently reviewed, and communicated it becomes more likely that they will occur.
Risks for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
For a project like our vehicle purchase, the risks are most likely personal.
For example, one risk could be stated as:
- If you buy an unreliable vehicle, even under a warranty, it can cause you additional effort in maintenance or return trips to the dealership, and this impacts your personal time, or even your time during the workday.
- To mitigate this, you could purchase ratings services or take the time to research additional vehicle reliability data and discuss with your vehicle expert.
- You could also mitigate this by sticking with particular models that have historically good repair records.
The risk above follows the pattern of Issue (buying an unreliable vehicle), Causes a problem (additional effort in maintenance or return trips to the dealership), that has a negative Impact (reduces personal time or cuts into work time). This is followed by a potential Mitigation strategy.
Weekly Habits for Risks
Risks need a weekly review. If they are listed in order of most critical to least critical, whether you use statements or scoring, or both, should not take more than a 5 to 10-minute review each week.
A few minutes allows time to confirm their probability, severity and mitigation; and time to review any issues to determine if additional risks need to be added.
Managing risks on a weekly basis is covered in this article.
For more detail on developing and phrasing risks see the INITIATE risk article.
People
The “Who” domain for your project includes all things related to “People”.
This includes a description of the roles and what is expected of each, the organizational structure and authority for decision making, identification of those who have the most stake in the project success, how you will communicate with people on the project, and how the stakeholders are going to make changes to their personal habits to adopt the project solution.
The “Who” is your People
1. Roles
Your Roles document is a list of responsibilities per position on the project. Positions are labels given to the collection of responsibilities.
Role examples include: Project Sponsor, Project Manager, Project Support, Project Communications, and Trainer, to name just a few.
For each role, list in bullet form all of the tasks expected of that role. As example, these might be the responsibilities for the Project Sponsor:
Project Role Example
Create this Role Responsibility list prior to adding people’s names. This allows you to create a detailed and complete list of all required responsibilities before you potentially bias your perspective by thinking of the person instead of the role.
Once roles and responsibilities are detailed, then communicate with the project people you’ve assigned roles to and confirm that your descriptions match their expectation of their responsibilities on the project; in other words, confirm that your assumptions are correct.
This can be very illuminating, especially if someone feels uncomfortable in a role you have asked them to be in. It is important to make sure all necessary project responsibilities are covered, though, so that is why it is important to detail the responsibilities before assigning people’s names.
A complete list of responsibilities and then ownership for everything on the list is essential for a successful project.
Roles for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
For our vehicle purchase project, the roles are a smaller list, but as an example of your vehicle expert or advisor:
Vehicle Purchase Project Role Example
Weekly Habits for Roles
Roles and responsibilities do not change on a weekly basis, so they do not need a weekly review.
It is worth a 3-minute review each month to ensure all stated responsibilities are being done. Sometimes it can be surprising to see details that have been forgotten or even who is supposed to be doing what.
If the responsibilities change, these can be shifted around with agreement from those affected, and a review and re-approval with stakeholders is not necessary because as long as the responsibility is being covered by someone with an appropriate skill level, the impact to the project is minimal.
2. Organization
The Organization identifies, in an org chart-type of view the decision-making authority within the project.
Project Organization identifies decision-making authority
Decision-making authority includes who gives the final approval for outcomes and financials, who is helping with communications, who is consulted rather than being more directly involved, and if there is a steering committee, how they fit in.
Projects use resources in an organization, usually scarce resources, to produce an outcome of value. However, there are always questions raised at the executive and other levels challenging the best use of scarce resources and the best allocation of those resources. A good project organization chart ensures the transparency and oversight that is needed.
Organization for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
In the vehicle purchase project, if you and your vehicle advisor friend are the core team, then you are the steering committee, so that together you make the critical decisions and any changes and approve of milestone completions.
If you have several friends helping you, you may formally or informally identify that one of those friends is going to be the one who makes the final decision for you. You have just inadvertently created an organization structure for your vehicle purchase.
The final decision may simply fall to you, as the person who is also playing the role of sponsor, or if you have a partner or spouse who you share bank accounts with, they may need to be convinced of your decision.
Weekly Habits for Organization
The Organization should not have a weekly variance and so does not need a weekly review.
You can change the Organization if necessary, but you will need a review or re-approval from the Steering Committee. As well, members of the Steering Committee can change, though it is usually made out of a core set of key stakeholders and remains fairly constant.
You can review the structure from the Charter every couple of months very briefly to ensure consistency, but it is not something that typically experiences a lot of change.
3. Stakeholders
We call the people involved in your project “stakeholders”, because they have a stake in how it turns out.
A stakeholder is anyone who is directly or indirectly affected by the outcomes of the project.
Internal Stakeholders include those inside your organization such as your project team, other managers, your manager and the executive chain above you.
External Stakeholders are those outside your organization such as regulatory bodies, suppliers, business partners, or customers.
In INITIATE you clarify expectations of your stakeholders and document those in the charter.
Clarify expectations for your stakeholders
It is important to clarify the role you expect stakeholders to play, where they fit in the project organization, how much of their time you expect, how you communicate with them, and to also record what they expect of you and your project.
Key stakeholders are those who are usually internal and of special interest to you because they are usually individuals who are very supportive and want to ensure the project succeeds no matter what – this blog post discusses them.
Throughout the project as you spend focussed time in LEAD, keep close relations with your stakeholders and ensure their expectations are being met.
Expectations can change, as for example with a new regulation that impacts your project, and your stakeholders can help you through those changes.
Stakeholders can be internal and external
Working with Stakeholders and more detailed descriptions of Stakeholders are covered in this blog post.
Stakeholders in Your Vehicle Purchase Project
In the vehicle purchase project example, your vehicle expert or advisor is your key stakeholder. At the outset they want to know your expectations for their involvement, including how soon and how much of their time you think you’ll need.
Before you start your vehicle purchase project you should discuss the purpose, assumptions and risks with them, so that any expectations you each have are in alignment.
In your vehicle purchase project, you may have other stakeholders as well, including some who you just inform of your decision.
Your stakeholders can be engaged in several different ways. They could just be informed, or accountable for specific decisions or outcomes, or responsible to assist with the decision making, or even just consulted when a decision is being made.
How you engage with stakeholders for you project needs to be clarified up front so you both have the same expectations. For more details on the different ways you could engage with your stakeholders and how to document this during INITIATE see this blog post.
Weekly Habits in regard to Stakeholders
Stakeholders are engaged with on a weekly and daily basis. These are the people who play the most important roles in the success of your project.
Early in the week spend 10 minutes going through your list of stakeholders and review expectations and required communications.
For external stakeholders review any expectations due in the upcoming week and add to your to-do list any personal, specific communications, referring to your communications plan, covered in the next section of this blog post, for your directions.
For internal stakeholders, identify any necessary meetings or communications to review expectations. It is a good idea to set up a recurring 15 to 30-minute touch point with your project Champion or Sponsor to discuss status and any concerns or information they need from you regarding the project that will assist them in their weekly responsibilities.
For internal stakeholders such as your team members, you should have a weekly, probably 1-hour, status meeting to discuss deliverable and task progress and review the overall schedule.
Your 30-minute review is also the time to note any follow-up needed with any of your project team in preparation for the weekly project team meeting.
4. Communications
Communications covers status reporting, presentations, status meetings, and updating both internal and external stakeholders.
Project Communications are essential, but can take time
Communications can involve quite a bit of time for the project manager.
It is helpful to create a communications plan that details periodic communications and communications that occur in the case of a project event.
Examples of periodic communications are covered in the blog post at this link.
A more detailed explanation of a Communications Plan is covered in this blog post.
Communications also covers the critical weekly team meeting and how you communicate with your team. With the project team it is critical to create excitement, personal ownership, and urgency for completing intermediate milestones and weekly tasks.
A key factor in the team’s results is in the language you use. There are a number of SPMS blog posts which cover that, because it is so critical and has one of the greatest impacts on your project. A couple of them are linked below:
1 Tip on How to Use Words for a Safe Environment
1 Strong Way to Ignite Productive Brainstorming
Others can be found by going to the Simple PM Strategies site Learning Hub and selecting “Leading the Team” and click on the Tag for Communications to find others.
Communications for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
In your vehicle purchase project if we have a role of Vehicle Expert and we add an additional role of Interested Parent we could create a communications plan that looks something like the following, organized by Role.
Communications Plan for Vehicle Purchase Project Example
Weekly Habits for Communications
Create a communications plan. Review that plan for 20 minutes early in the week and confirm the repeating schedule you have created for communications throughout the week.
In that 20 minutes identify any anomalies or special communications required over and above the normal pattern based on any project events that have occurred.
Note any special communications needed with individual project team members, especially a personal email or scheduling a few minutes to speak with them one-on-one.
Your Project Management communications are critical enough that a 20-minute weekly review is necessary at the start of the week.
Throughout the week time will be taken by Status Meetings and creating and sending Status Reports. A substantial amount of time can be saved by repurposing items for Status Meetings and Status Reports, and how to do this is covered in the workshops and reviewed in an upcoming blog post.
5. Adoption
Projects introduce change. Change affects people personally by altering their daily and weekly routines to adopt new ways of operating. Projects change how business operates.
One of the key responsibilities of the project manager is to ensure that those affected by the change successfully adopt the new way of operating into their existing habits and routines.
In LEAD, the change we are covering is the change that affects people as a result of what the project implements, and how to minimize any negative impact on productivity that comes when something new is introduced into people’s usual routines and ways of operating. It is successful when people adopt the new way of operating, so we call the LEAD change “Adoption”.
Adoption of change is moving people from the current state of productivity to a future state of productivity.
The above diagram is explained in a blog post on managing change.
The bottom-line regarding Adoption is that the project team needs to understand how personal routines and ways of doing things may be different after the project. They will need to create ways of helping people shift from the old way to the new way, so that all staff successfully adopt the new way of working.
Adoption for Your Vehicle Purchase Project
In the vehicle purchase project Adoption can include, depending on the vehicle purchased:
- Training on new vehicle options: Schedule a 1-hour timeslot for three different evenings within the first week of ownership to go over options and locations
- Training on new vehicle maintenance: Schedule a 2-hour timeslot on a Saturday to practice changing the tire on the new vehicle.
- If an electric vehicle, arrange for the installation of a charging port in your garage one week prior to taking ownership of the vehicle.
- If an electric vehicle, allocate three hours one night one week prior to ownership, to determine how to get to available charging stations and do some conceptual route planning based on current driving geography.
These are some starting ideas, but it illustrates that projects introduce changes to our existing ways of operating and they do so at a personal level. Therefore to create the most effective training for the most successful Adoption, the analysis and material must be at a personal level.
Weekly Habits for Adoption
Adoption of new ways of working for your end customer is material that is developed and training that is provided later in the project, with the timing close to when there are no more changes to the end product, and just before people have to use the new solution, so they don’t forget between when they take the training and when they use the new solution.
Adoption is also further up in the project, developing what the end customer currently does and what the new solution changes, so the change can be understood, minimized, and material for training developed early on, but that is covered in another blog post.
At this time we are going to constrain Adoption to be just the tasks related to developing the training materials for the end customer to use and taking them through that training.
This scope of Adoption does not involve weekly activities until near the end of the project. At that time, it could involve several days per week from the project manager developing and administering the training.
If the manager has someone in the role helping with this, then the manger’s time on Adoption on a weekly basis near the end of the project is defining the scope of what needs to be in the training, timing of the training and review and approval of the material used for training.
Summary
LEAD project items under Motive are about steering the project through the assumptions and risks to ensure that it achieves its stated purpose. Once the purpose is defined, weekly activities under Motive mainly involve tracking, managing and communicating risks.
LEAD project items under People involve one of the greatest time commitments and personal challenges for the manager managing the project.
Ensuring stakeholders are engaged and expectations are understood and met requires skill in packaging the project information into simple but relevant high-level messages, succinct that it can be understood, and support can be garnered where needed, but not so detailed that attention is lost.
Ensuring stakeholders who are project team members are engaged is presenting the project information in a different way. The messaging must be collaborative and create urgency to get tasks and deliverables done week to week. Communication has to be detailed enough to ask probing questions to resolve underlying issues that need to be discovered.
LEAD involves Communicating with all Stakeholders both Internal and External in a way that provides just the right amount of messaging at the right time for the right event.
LEAD also requires ensure the end customer of the project outcome successfully Adopts the new solution and integrates it into their daily habits and routines, creating new ways of operating.
LEAD can absorb a significant amount of the manager’s time each week, so re-purposing and re-use of material in an organized and deliberate way needs to be developed to get the most done in the least amount of time.
Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge
Create review time in the early part of the week for the following weekly LEAD activities:
- Review Risks – Use the time suggested. Read them over and ensure nothing is appearing on the horizon. Create a routine to add them to the status report draft for the week if there is a risk of them materializing.
- Stakeholders – Use the time suggested. Set up a sponsor/champion recurring call / meeting. Set up a team recurring call / meeting.
- Communications – Use the time suggested. Review what communications have to go out and when in the next reporting period to both internal and external stakeholders and at those to your task list.
- The key to saving time and being effective with communications is re-purposing and re-using content. Create templates and repeatable steps for all status reporting and meetings. Design it to use the content from a single source and copy and drop that into your templates.
Learn More
Business evolves through change initiatives otherwise known as projects. The key to managing these change initiatives so you have more time, and less stress is to use simple strategies and tools.
Have fun with some short quizzes on leading, controlling, and planning projects: Three quizzes on leading, controlling, and planning projects
Check out the Learning Hub for other Articles with Actionable Steps, organized, with a busy leader in mind, by topic or main idea: https://simplepmstrategies.com/learning-hub-index
LEAD - Main
© Simple PM Strategies 2021