Although managing stakeholder expectations speaks to the essence of project management and is a key objective of all project definition, planning, and control activities, it is often ignored in introductory project management books. There are two main reasons:
Expectations are a critical success factor - Although scope, budget, and schedule are core elements of managing expectations, there is more and if you ignore it, the odds for real project success are greatly diminished.
You can make a difference - Because expectations deal with perceptions and often get into the “art” of project management, they can be less tangible, which makes it more challenging to offer guidance.
Sign of project management maturity - Nothing says “experience” and “I’m not a rookie” more than a project manager who understands the importance of guiding stakeholder expectations and who constantly focuses on this aspect of their project.
Let's explore the critical aspects of expectations, the key components of successfully managing stakeholder expectations, the common mistakes to avoid, and the essential principles and techniques that will guide us in any project environment.
Critical Aspects of Expectations
For expectations, there is one key concept and four critical components that need to be understood for effective management.
1. Balancing Reality and Perception
The key concept is that expectations are shaped by both reality and perception. In an ideal project, both the reality and perception of project objectives, performance, targeted results, and expected impact are aligned upfront among all stakeholders during project definition and planning, and then remain this way throughout the project. However, this ideal situation is elusive. Even when expectations are aligned during planning, there are many influences and factors that can alter expectations during the course of the project. This relationship is depicted in the figure shown below:
It's a challenge for project manager to guide the actual “real” performance of the project while simultaneously aligning and balancing the perception of each stakeholder. This work is a dynamic, ongoing venture that is only complete when the project is closed.
2. More than Scope Management
There is more to managing expectations than just managing scope. There are four critical components of expectations. Each expectation element is important to the success of the project and is subject to the natural push and pull between project reality and stakeholder perceptions as shown in the figure below:
Let’s review each expectation component in greater detail-
The key principles to remember are:
The success formula for each aspect of expectation management is relatively straightforward:
Principles of Expectation Management
Let’s look at the seven master principles that drive all expectation management activity:
1. Get buy-in - Whether it's the critical success criteria, resource and time commitments, or individual work assignments, invest the time and energy to gain their trust and to make sure you have genuine buy-in from the affected parties. This is why effective planning is a must.
2. Take care of business - This is the "blocking and tackling" fundamentals of project management. Set your baselines, manage to them, and properly handle and communicate any variances.
3. Communicate the "big picture" - With the end goal in mind, clearly sell the vision on where the project is going, what the targeted solution will be like, and why each work assignment is important. People want to know "why" and understand the importance of their role.
4.Listen and be alert - If stakeholders are not "on the same page" or have "unstated expectations," there are always cues and signals. Look and listen for them and make it a priority to deal with them quickly.
5. Take their perspective - This ability is a mainstay for effective expectation management, and it will empower you to anticipate the needs and concerns of your project stakeholders. It will also drive a "flexible" mindset that allows you to adapt approaches, plans, and specifications to best meet the situation at hand.
6. Never assume - A key principle that needs constant attention. Many don't realize the assumptions that are working under until it is too late. To help you avoid assumptions, keep the following in mind:
7. Understand priorities - There are always many stakeholders, often with their own distinct views of the world and sets of priorities. While you always aim to find compromises that will appeal to entire group, it is important to understand the decision-making process and whose voices have greater influence and priority. In particular, always be very clear on who controls the budget for your project.
Essential Elements of Managing Expectations
Following are the essential tools and techniques that are available to the project manager to effectively manage stakeholder expectations:
A. Project Planning and Control Elements
Essential Control and Execution Elements to Manage Project Expectations
Leveraging Kickoff Meetings
Kickoff meetings are a simple but powerful tool to help manage expectations. In general, a kickoff meeting is simple. Get all of the targeted stakeholders together to officially review the project and get it underway. Kickoff meetings are invaluable for accomplishing certain things related to expectation management, and many people either do not do them properly or under-utilize them.
1. Primary Goals
The three primary goals for any kickoff meeting should include the following:
2. Key Recommendations
With these goals in mind, here are some key recommendations for better kickoff meetings:
1. The meeting size, length, and logistics will vary depending on organizational culture, project size, number of stakeholders, project methodology, and project importance. Plan your kickoff meetings accordingly.
2. As a rule, don't try to do too much or cover everything. Use follow-up, mini-kickoff meetings with focused groups or specific individuals to cover the details.
3. For general kickoffs, get everyone there if possible, especially the executive sponsors.
4. Set context for everyone. Focus on the "why." Review project purpose, objectives, and value to the business.
5. Clarify the priorities, target goals, and the critical success factors.
6. Paint the picture. Enable everyone to visualize how the final solution will look, how it will impact them, and how all the pieces fit together.
7. Get to know each other. Start the relationship-building and teamwork processes. Introduce everyone.
8. Review roles and responsibilities and project team organization. Emphasize each person's role, expected time commitment, and value.
9. Establish your leadership and the energy for the project. Set the tone; generate enthusiasm and motivation.
10. Review important project plan items:
11. Whenever possible, hand out team memorabilia at the beginning of the project. It helps to build team unity and project awareness.
12. Ask for feedback. Clarify any confusion now.
13. Ensure people know what to do first/next (short-term). They should be clear on their next steps.
Requirements Management
A large percentage of expectation misunderstandings have their origins in the requirements gathering and requirements management processes. The frustrating thing about these situations is that most of these can (or could) be avoided. While the subject of requirements definition is a field of study itself, we will leverage the Pareto principle here. We will focus our attention on addressing the common requirements-related problems and the key principles and guidelines that will make the most difference in your future requirements definition and management efforts.
1. Common Problems to Avoid
Let's take a quick review of the common problems with gathering and defining requirements:
2. Principles to Remember for Better Requirements Management
To help you develop better requirements and to improve your ability to manage both requirements and expectations throughout the project, let's review the following principles:
Guidelines for Better Requirements
To avoid the common problems identified earlier and to greatly increase your requirements definition prowess, note the following guidelines:
1. Focus on user "experience." Understand how the user interacts with the targeted solution.
2. Understand the user's workflow.
3. Understand the user's work environment.
4. Always ask "why?"
5. Include other non-language exhibits/models as part of the requirements definition
6. To drive out unstated expectations, understand the following from each user representative:
8. Identify each requirement with a unique ID.
9. Document any accompanying assumptions.
10. Use a quality checklist to improve the effectiveness of your requirements.
11. Monitor and control changes to requirements.
12. Use a requirements traceability matrix (RTM) to link each requirement to one or more aspects of the final solution. This is a powerful tool to ensure that every requirement is accounted for and to better control "gold-plating."
Here I am ending this topic. In the next topic we will review the common characteristics of high-performing project teams, explore the management principles and techniques that foster better team performance, and offer key advice on how to best handle challenging project team situations frequently encountered by project managers.
- Many consider it to be an advanced project management topic.
- Many people do not know how to manage expectations and thus just lump it with other project management activities.
Expectations are a critical success factor - Although scope, budget, and schedule are core elements of managing expectations, there is more and if you ignore it, the odds for real project success are greatly diminished.
You can make a difference - Because expectations deal with perceptions and often get into the “art” of project management, they can be less tangible, which makes it more challenging to offer guidance.
Sign of project management maturity - Nothing says “experience” and “I’m not a rookie” more than a project manager who understands the importance of guiding stakeholder expectations and who constantly focuses on this aspect of their project.
Let's explore the critical aspects of expectations, the key components of successfully managing stakeholder expectations, the common mistakes to avoid, and the essential principles and techniques that will guide us in any project environment.
Critical Aspects of Expectations
For expectations, there is one key concept and four critical components that need to be understood for effective management.
1. Balancing Reality and Perception
The key concept is that expectations are shaped by both reality and perception. In an ideal project, both the reality and perception of project objectives, performance, targeted results, and expected impact are aligned upfront among all stakeholders during project definition and planning, and then remain this way throughout the project. However, this ideal situation is elusive. Even when expectations are aligned during planning, there are many influences and factors that can alter expectations during the course of the project. This relationship is depicted in the figure shown below:
2. More than Scope Management
There is more to managing expectations than just managing scope. There are four critical components of expectations. Each expectation element is important to the success of the project and is subject to the natural push and pull between project reality and stakeholder perceptions as shown in the figure below:
Let’s review each expectation component in greater detail-
- Critical Success Factors - This aspect includes the traditional measuring rods of scope, schedule, and budget. In addition, it includes any additional acceptance criteria that you established with your key stakeholders during project definition and planning. The heart of project management is focused on managing expectations around these elements, but the key tools are a solid project definition document, a realistic schedule, a baselined budget, early detection of performance variances, and disciplined change control.
- Project Impact - This component highlights the "change" impact of the project output (results, solution, work products). It accounts for any work, process, or organizational change experienced by any stakeholder as a result of the project outcome. This aspect is commonly neglected by less experienced organizations and project managers. The key here is to think (and plan) with the end in mind. With this clarity, you can better communicate a common vision of the project outcome and help stakeholders prepare for the changes that will affect them.
- Work Products - This category covers things such as "that's not what I asked for," "that's not what I meant," and "oh no, you gave me exactly what I asked for." This could be considered a part of project scope, but depending upon the level of detail in your scope statement, it may not be adequately addressed. This category deals with the detailed expectations surrounding the individual work products that each stakeholder has. At a minimum, it focuses on requirements management, quality management, and overall project approach.
- Project Execution - This final component deals with the day-to-day execution of the project. While not as critical as the other aspects, a lack of attention to these elements will certainly create situations that can easily lead to under performing projects, and then to major expectation management activities. This category deals with the efficiency and effectiveness of the project team, and with the confidence the stakeholders have in them to successfully deliver the targeted solution and in you to lead them there. Common elements in this group include interactions between team and client stakeholders, clarity of roles, responsibilities, work processes, and work assignments.
The key principles to remember are:
- Make sure team members are prepared for their interactions with stakeholders;
- Do not assume stakeholders have a clear understanding of project processes and their work assignments;
- Always look at the project from their perspective; and proactively review (with a gentle touch) key asks and targeted completion dates.
The success formula for each aspect of expectation management is relatively straightforward:
- Get real - Set realistic expectations; get initial agreement (buy-in) from affected stakeholders; review assumptions and constraints; talk about it; address it; get clarity and understanding.
- Keep it balanced - Manage changes; align project reality with stakeholder perceptions; proactively communicate; educate; constantly validate and affirm perceptions; regularly assess performance; reset expectations as needed
- Follow-through Deliver; honor the agreements; get the work done; "under-promise, over-deliver."
Principles of Expectation Management
Let’s look at the seven master principles that drive all expectation management activity:
1. Get buy-in - Whether it's the critical success criteria, resource and time commitments, or individual work assignments, invest the time and energy to gain their trust and to make sure you have genuine buy-in from the affected parties. This is why effective planning is a must.
2. Take care of business - This is the "blocking and tackling" fundamentals of project management. Set your baselines, manage to them, and properly handle and communicate any variances.
3. Communicate the "big picture" - With the end goal in mind, clearly sell the vision on where the project is going, what the targeted solution will be like, and why each work assignment is important. People want to know "why" and understand the importance of their role.
4.Listen and be alert - If stakeholders are not "on the same page" or have "unstated expectations," there are always cues and signals. Look and listen for them and make it a priority to deal with them quickly.
5. Take their perspective - This ability is a mainstay for effective expectation management, and it will empower you to anticipate the needs and concerns of your project stakeholders. It will also drive a "flexible" mindset that allows you to adapt approaches, plans, and specifications to best meet the situation at hand.
6. Never assume - A key principle that needs constant attention. Many don't realize the assumptions that are working under until it is too late. To help you avoid assumptions, keep the following in mind:
- Err on the side of over-communication
- Always set context for all of your communications
- Constantly confirm understanding
- Clearly communicate what is expected from each team member
- Continuously reset expectations
- Verify that you have the correct solution to meet the project's objectives (rather than just validating documented requirements)
7. Understand priorities - There are always many stakeholders, often with their own distinct views of the world and sets of priorities. While you always aim to find compromises that will appeal to entire group, it is important to understand the decision-making process and whose voices have greater influence and priority. In particular, always be very clear on who controls the budget for your project.
Essential Elements of Managing Expectations
Following are the essential tools and techniques that are available to the project manager to effectively manage stakeholder expectations:
A. Project Planning and Control Elements
- Project Definition Document
- Scope Statement
- WBS
- Project Budget
- Estimates
- Assumptions and Constraints
- Project Schedule
- Project Plan
- Project Organization Chart
- Stakeholder Analysis
- Communications Plan
- Responsibility Matrix
- Project Approach
Essential Control and Execution Elements to Manage Project Expectations
- Kickoff meetings
- Status reports
- Change control
- Quality management
- Risk management
- Issue management
- Requirements management
- Completion criteria
- Formal sign-offs
- Reviews
- Milestones and checkpoints
- Requirements trace-ability matrix
- Team charter
Leveraging Kickoff Meetings
Kickoff meetings are a simple but powerful tool to help manage expectations. In general, a kickoff meeting is simple. Get all of the targeted stakeholders together to officially review the project and get it underway. Kickoff meetings are invaluable for accomplishing certain things related to expectation management, and many people either do not do them properly or under-utilize them.
1. Primary Goals
The three primary goals for any kickoff meeting should include the following:
- Give official notification that the project (or project phase) is underway
- Achieve a common expectation baseline for all stakeholders
- Start the relationship-building process between project team, customers, and other stakeholders
2. Key Recommendations
With these goals in mind, here are some key recommendations for better kickoff meetings:
1. The meeting size, length, and logistics will vary depending on organizational culture, project size, number of stakeholders, project methodology, and project importance. Plan your kickoff meetings accordingly.
2. As a rule, don't try to do too much or cover everything. Use follow-up, mini-kickoff meetings with focused groups or specific individuals to cover the details.
3. For general kickoffs, get everyone there if possible, especially the executive sponsors.
4. Set context for everyone. Focus on the "why." Review project purpose, objectives, and value to the business.
5. Clarify the priorities, target goals, and the critical success factors.
6. Paint the picture. Enable everyone to visualize how the final solution will look, how it will impact them, and how all the pieces fit together.
7. Get to know each other. Start the relationship-building and teamwork processes. Introduce everyone.
8. Review roles and responsibilities and project team organization. Emphasize each person's role, expected time commitment, and value.
9. Establish your leadership and the energy for the project. Set the tone; generate enthusiasm and motivation.
10. Review important project plan items:
- Scope and major deliverables
- General approach (methodology)
- Critical milestones
- WBS
- Schedule
- Estimated effort and budget
- Review key assumptions, risks, and constraints
- Review key project communications processes
- Review process/procedures for monitoring project performance
11. Whenever possible, hand out team memorabilia at the beginning of the project. It helps to build team unity and project awareness.
12. Ask for feedback. Clarify any confusion now.
13. Ensure people know what to do first/next (short-term). They should be clear on their next steps.
Requirements Management
A large percentage of expectation misunderstandings have their origins in the requirements gathering and requirements management processes. The frustrating thing about these situations is that most of these can (or could) be avoided. While the subject of requirements definition is a field of study itself, we will leverage the Pareto principle here. We will focus our attention on addressing the common requirements-related problems and the key principles and guidelines that will make the most difference in your future requirements definition and management efforts.
1. Common Problems to Avoid
Let's take a quick review of the common problems with gathering and defining requirements:
- Not well-written - Requirements are ambiguous, inconsistent, too high-level, or not clear.
- Incomplete - List of requirements is not complete to properly define the solution.
- Unstated expectations - The list of requirements does not accurately reflect all of the expectations held by the stakeholders for the targeted solution.
- Inflexible process - While specifications do need to be agreed to and finalized at certain points, defining requirements is an evolutionary process and things do change. The system for managing requirements must anticipate this reality.
- Inadequate definition process - The age-old problem with language. Using statements to describe a targeted solution creates many opportunities for misunderstandings and wrong perceptions. In most cases, you need to employ other techniques and methods to verify that you are defining the "right" solution. Techniques that help stakeholders visualize the final work product or solution are especially helpful.
- Lack of education - Often, the stakeholders who are defining the solution requirements don't fully understand the entire requirements process and the significance or impact of their decisions.
- Ineffective review process - Some examples include using a process that is not a good match for the reviewers’ natural working method or schedule; using a process that does not ensure reviewers are engaged; or using a process that does not make it easy to see what changed from the previous version.
- Using the wrong tool for the job - In addition to the challenges with leveraging the right techniques and methods to elicit requirements, the wrong tool is used to capture, store, and manage the documented requirements. In many situations, a requirements management tool that uses a centralized database foundation is what is needed to properly handle the needs of the project, solution, or organization versus the document based approach.
2. Principles to Remember for Better Requirements Management
To help you develop better requirements and to improve your ability to manage both requirements and expectations throughout the project, let's review the following principles:
- Requirements definition is an evolutionary process. Plan your project approach and requirements management tools accordingly.
- Requirements definition process should consist of a combination of gathering techniques. The specific techniques chosen should be based on risks and characteristics of the project.
- Requirements should describe what, not how.
- Requirements should avoid any unnecessary constraints.
- Requirements should be complete, explicit, realistic, and understandable by all parties.
- Requirements should be linked to the intended solution.
- Requirements should be prioritized.
- Listen. Do not pre-judge or draw conclusions too quickly.
- Strive to convert expectations into requirements.
- Educate appropriate stakeholders on the requirements process.
- If requirements are for an enhancement, change, or addition to an existing solution, update the original requirements artifacts that define the total working solution versus relying solely on new, specific, separate artifacts for the requested change.
- Use a tool to manage requirements that meets the needs of the project, solution, and organization.
Guidelines for Better Requirements
To avoid the common problems identified earlier and to greatly increase your requirements definition prowess, note the following guidelines:
1. Focus on user "experience." Understand how the user interacts with the targeted solution.
2. Understand the user's workflow.
3. Understand the user's work environment.
4. Always ask "why?"
5. Include other non-language exhibits/models as part of the requirements definition
6. To drive out unstated expectations, understand the following from each user representative:
- What are biggest problems now, and why?
- What functions or features will be the most useful, and why?
- What aspect of the new solution are you most anticipating, and why?
- What are your quality and performance expectations for the final solution, and why?
8. Identify each requirement with a unique ID.
9. Document any accompanying assumptions.
10. Use a quality checklist to improve the effectiveness of your requirements.
11. Monitor and control changes to requirements.
12. Use a requirements traceability matrix (RTM) to link each requirement to one or more aspects of the final solution. This is a powerful tool to ensure that every requirement is accounted for and to better control "gold-plating."
Here I am ending this topic. In the next topic we will review the common characteristics of high-performing project teams, explore the management principles and techniques that foster better team performance, and offer key advice on how to best handle challenging project team situations frequently encountered by project managers.
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