Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! (Rocky Balboa)
Well, what Rocky knew about life is true about projects too! It doesn’t matter how great your goal is and how much positive change you can reach: there will always be someone who’s against everything you do and that will try to stop you and every of your actions! Actually every big organization is designed to be anti-change. That’s how it’s surviving.
But, just like Rocky, you still can reach great results if you’re willing to take the hits!
Let me tell you something about my survival tactics:
Writing is boring, but helpful
That’s one of the oldest tricks in business, but it still works. Everything you’ve written down is proof. Of course, this could be to your disadvantage but trust me, in most cases it helps you. Facts about long e-mails:
- They aren’t read instantly (or ever)
- They aren’t read in one attempt
- They aren’t understood right-away, but most times no-one will ask for details since it would be embarrassing to do so
- They help you to structure your own work
I’m not the type creating and managing task lists. I just don’t like it. Writing those e-mails is basically my way of reporting, structuring and planing.
Reduce communication channels
Isn’t today’s world beautiful? You got phone, e-mail, skype, what’s app, facebook, xing, linkedin, bla bla bla. Those are just the “modern” communication channels… If you include the old ones (letter, fax, etc.) you’ll never know who said what when… I tend to use one channel for one communication group. Example:
- Customer => e-mail
- Team => skype
This let’s you find things easier. And you will have to find things! Additionally you can chose the “tone” for each channel 😉
Categorize the players
One of the first things I do in every projects is to categorize the people I have to deal with. That has a lot to do with experience, but there are simple tricks that help you to do it yourself:
- Ask yourself, what personal agenda each person could have in the project. In a earlier post I talked about the crazy effect goal systems can have on an employee’s motivation. Try to find out everybody’s agenda asap! And trust me: they don’t have the same agenda!
- Try to focus on (personal) relationships between the involved persons. This helps you in finding out, who to tell what in order to make someone else know!
- Always expect the persons to have good relationships to someone high in the organization outside of the project. You should never be the one holding the stick when someone get’s beaten.
- If conflicts between different groups in projects are coming up, always remember that you as an external are not the one that has to solve the problem! But you’re the (only) one that an moderate the problem! That’s why you should never be the one telling one party that they are / create the problem. You always need an internal understanding your thoughts.
Expect the most stupid move
My personal favorite: you’ll never to anticipate how stupid people can be 😉 Always be ready that someone is forgetting everything that happened last month, last week, or today after breakfast (that brings me back to the writing part). Make sure that you’re ready for that. Make sure, that they’re not able to blame you for something you actually did right but they forgot because of project amnesia.This will happen all the time and it won’t make any sense to you, since you’re just interested in bringing the project to a good end whilst the internal players are actually trying to improve their internal position by making themselves victims of the bad bad external guy. If they’re delayed in their work they will try to find your mistakes to make you responsible for the overall delay.
If you anticipate that, you might be the one to profit from one of those “actions to make the other one responsible”.
I’ll continue this list sometime 😉
Categories: basics
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