I have spoken more than 2,000 times before audiences of as many as 23,000 people, in 24 countries. My seminars and talks have varied in length from five minutes to five days. In every case, I have focused on sharing the best ideas I could find on the particular subject with that audience at that moment. After countless talks on various themes, if I was only given five minutes to speak to you, and I could only convey one thought that would help you to be more successful, I would tell you to “write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.”
And what one millionaire had to say:
A group of successful men got together in Chicago some time ago, talking about the experiences of their lives. All of them were millionaires and multi-millionaires. Like most successful people, they were both humble and grateful for what they had achieved, and for the blessings that life had bestowed upon them. As they discussed the reasons why they had managed to achieve so much in life, the wisest man among them spoke up and said that, in his estimate, “success is goals, and all else is commentary.”
Within the first 30 minutes of my entry to West Point, I was told I had only four answers to give to someone in authority: 1) “Yes, sir!”, 2) “No, sir!”, 3) “No excuse, sir!”, and “Sir, I do not understand.” No one wants to hear excuses from a professional. Some of the most painful words I have had to utter in my career (and I can count the times on one hand) are “I can’t do it.” The professional finds a way to do it, gets help, delegates, negotiates, or whatever is necessary to get the job done. SO:
Keeping up with the latest trends in IT strategy can be challenging. Here’s helping you stay up to speed with the latest developments in IT business strategy. Check out this IT Strategy Conference Calendar for CIOs.
Free registration with TechTarget.com is required to view the calendar.
Stay up to date and keep your enterprise on track!
“Jargon” is just the nomenclature of the technology industry that expedites communication among IT professionals. But just as it sometimes can confuse even us, you can imagine the potential it has for confusing the CEO or CFO who expect you to keep up with the technology, but to communicate to them in English. Of course, you already know that you must keep tech-speak to a minimum in order to sell your ideas to your C-level colleagues. So, to help you do just that, here is a list of words to be avoided at all cost so that your discussions will smoothly avoid becoming bogged down in endless explanations, causing panic, promoting misunderstanding, or making concepts difficult to grasp. Review the list before your discussions with your C-level counterpart and feel confident that you’ve got your techno-speak covered. Adapted from Don Reisinger’s slides.
1. Hackers – Stick with “potential danger.” Gets the point across; sounds much nicer. 2. Syncing – Choose an innocuous alternative, such as “add.” 3. Cloud Computing – Instead, say you want to invest in Internet-based services to help the company improve productivity and save money. 4. Virtualization – Instead, demonstrate a virtualized app for them; it’s much easier for C-levels to grasp the concept. 5. Virtual Storage – The phrase may mean nothing to your CEO. Say you want to invest in online storage to save money. 6. Servers and Blades – The average CEO might be lost with “blades” in the conversation. Best to keep both words out of your discussions. 7. Firewall – Better to say you want to invest in more protection to keep data secure. You’ll get your point across without causing alarm. 8. Phishing – Explain that without the proper safeguards in place, employees could be roped into scams that could put data at risk. 9. Malware – If you’re concerned about malware, stick with “virus” and “spyware.” It gets the point across without being confusing. 10. Cloud OS – The Windows-blinded CEO will not care about this. For now, investigate on your own, and bring it up when the time is right. 11. Open Source – Focus on the benefits, not on the technology, otherwise you’ll never get out of this meeting. 12. Texting – Keep that word out of the office and instead share highlight studies that show what young workers are really looking for. 13. Instant Messaging – Many execs view this as a way for employees to avoid work. You’ll need to frame it as a way for employees to communicate instantly and effectively.
“Do you want a solid understanding of the business objectives and requirements that are critical for the success of your projects? Then this webinar is for you! You’ll learn the role of the business analyst and their responsibilities within different lifecycle models, including sequential (waterfall), iterative, and agile approaches. Finally, you will gain an overview of common techniques used by business analysts to elicit, analyze, document, communicate, manage, and validate organizational goals, business objectives, and user requirements.”
Alas! Another oxymoronic phrase! Building trust quickly? Some things just take time.
Although there is little you can do to accelerate the very important process of building trust in any relationship, there are some things you can do to prevent the process from taking any longer than it has to. As Stephen Covey says, “When it comes to people, slow is fast, and fast is slow.” That is, the quickest way to achieving strong mutually trusting relationships is by slowly building trust. Here are excerpts from the Q & A following the “Interpersonal Effectiveness for Project Success” webinar:
As a contractor/consultant going into a client’s project for a short period of time, how can I build trust quickly?
Think clearly about the commitments we make (in terms of effort required, discretionary time available in schedule, other resources that you may need to pull in) and keep them.
Over-commitments result in not being able to deliver.
People are noting whether you are doing what you say you will do.
Who should I focus on to build that trust?
Immediate stakeholders are asking themselves: Do I want you? Am I willing to work with you again?
Focus on the person with the budget authority.
Build trust with ALL the stakeholders— because people talk with each other and influence each other’s opinion of you.
It is our reputation of trustworthiness that we are looking to uphold.
Regarding Passive/Aggressive people on virtual teams— How do I deal with them?
People in remote locations can hide easily… or sling a zinger.
The best way to deal with them is one-on-one and digging for root attitudes and issues to confront the problem.
Coordinate closely with the difficult person. When they have input and feel they’ve been understood, buy-in is higher and they are more likely to cooperate and less likely to hide / withdraw / undermine.
Follow-up with clarifying documentation to reflect the understanding and commitment. If it is not documented, the conversation becomes as if it had “never happened.”
Go Soft on People and Hard on the Problem
If we attack a person’s character, they will go on the defensive.
Be respectful, not blaming, but honest with them and focus on the dispassionate facts of the problem.
I was very pleased with the one-hour webinar “The Missing Link: Interpersonal Effectiveness for Project Success” that aired yesterday. The presenter gave many personal experiences from 20 years as a project manager that vividly illustrate the importance of the quality of relationships with project team members to the success of the project. You can attend the webinar on demand here.
The presenter addressed the big triple question for PMs (and BAs wearing the PM hat!):
“How do I get people to do what I want them to do? –on time? –and without authority over them?
She addressed the question by explaining how to:
Influence project participants at all levels including: clients, team members, stakeholders, and vendors.
Increase buy-in from team members and stakeholders by understanding the connection between trust, conflict, and accountability.
Understand how to develop and maintain accountability with project team members and stakeholders.
All three of the desirable outcomes can result from
1. Building Trust
a. By keeping commitments
b. By clarifying expectations
c. By listening
d. By admitting mistakes
e. By apologizing
f. By being willing to understand, accept, and change undesirable things about my own behavior.
2. Embracing Disagreement & Discussion
a. By seeking first to understand, then to be understood. –Stephen R. Covey
b. By respecting and valuing others by genuine listening.
c. By understanding that understanding does not mean agreement.
3. Clarifying for Commitment
a. By facilitating honest, open, respectful, thoughtful discussion.
4. Documenting for Accountability
a. By complementing the discussions with various project management tools:
i. Project Charter or Scope Statement
ii. Gantt Chart
iii. Communication Plan
iv. Meeting Agendas with Action Items
v. Change Requests
5. Requesting Results
a. Is greatly enhanced when done standing on the foundation laid in the four preceding points.
The presenter provided the sources (seven books) from which much of this webinar and successful project management is drawn.
You can attend the webinar on demand (during a lunch hour?) here.
The set of tasks and techniques used work as a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organization, and to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
The Business Analyst must ensure that requirements are visible to and understood by all stakeholders.
In the video below, Jeff Minder, PMP, explains the importance of high quality requirements gathering in terms of the following:
The BA is the “bridge” between the end users and the development group. He is the interpreter and the communicator among the stakeholders and solution providers who helps clarify the distinction between needs and wants.
The 68% IT project failure rate in 2008 was the worst year on record in a decade.
50% of the failures were due to poor requirements.
For the projects that actually succeeded, 45% of the functionality and features of the systems are never used, 19% are rarely used, and 16% are sometimes used for a shocking total of 80%. This staggering result is a failure to communicate that undoes the ROI, IRR, NPV, Payback Period, and every other financial measure of return on investment that was an imperative hurdle in the project’s business justification.
Poor requirements are the primary reason that 50% of projects are failing.
Poor requirements are the primary reason that 80% of project functionality goes unused in moving the enterprise toward achieving its goals.
Poor requirements are a result of under-developed Underlying Competencies of business analysts.
The “Triple Constraint” of Project Management is: Cost, Time, and Scope
Failed projects run late, over-budget, and are victims of scope-creep.
All are the direct result of poor requirements elicitation, documentation, communication, and change management.
The solution for enterprises that want their IT services to become more effective in helping them reach their organizational goals involves training, mentoring, and post-project analysis of individual business analyst performance in conjunction with an IT-wide effort to increase the maturity of individual and group competencies.
They make us laugh because of the elements of truth and the mention of things that we are often too careful to mention except in the most guarded of circumstances. They break the ice and give us relief!
And so we have it with Waterfall (Traditional) vs. Agile development methodologies: the classic “Incoherent Design” vs. the “Incomplete Project.”
I find my greatest success with a blend of the two that is appropriate for the industry, the company, the stakeholders, and the key driving factors of the project. We must have a coherent, full-scope design that is internally consistent and intuitive to use but designed only to the level of detail necessary for technicians to identify show-stopper issues. More detail design can take place on later phases while coding, testing, and implementation is taking place in the earlier phases.
I like to be in the process of continuously delivering parts of the system and training to user groups with an emphasis on providing the users with incremental functionality. With judicial coordination, this can result in a phased switchover to the new system which gives stakeholders a sense of project momentum while assuring the quality of the project.
One of the most important aspects of leadership is giving. If we are going to be effective with people, successful in projects, valuable in an enterprise, we must be giving our time, our interest, our energy, our expertise, our loyalty, our creativity– giving ourselves.
This blog is an avenue for me to give to my current colleagues in the workplace, fellow professionals in other organizations whose acquaintance is my privilege, and new people I hope to meet.
So what do I have to give today? How about four hours of FREE professional training?
I have always found the complimentary webinars from Corporate Education Group to be very professional and informative. I have no affiliation with Corporate Education Group. You can check out the details of this training on CEG’s website to see which of these can be applied to working toward your CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional). Here is the first of four FREE hours of professional training:
The Missing Link:
Interpersonal Effectiveness for Project Success
Date: November 11, 2009
Stephen R. Covey, in his philosophy of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ($0.99+shipping), points out that we cannot be efficient with people. We can be efficient with things, with processes or procedures, but we must be effective with people. It will be interesting to learn CEG’s treatment of “Interpersonal Effectiveness.”
Key learning points from this webinar include:
Increase buy-in from team members and stakeholders by understanding the connection between trust, conflict, and accountability
Understand how to develop and maintain accountability with project team members and stakeholders
Learn to influence project participants on all levels of the project who do not directly report to you including: clients, team members, stakeholders, vendors
You can attend the webinar on demand (during a lunch hour?) 
