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Using Deputies of Executives Effectively

ONE OF THE most effective ways I have discovered for managing executives who are impacted by your project is to engage with trusted deputies who report to them. A critical factor to consider is that since the deputies report directly to these key executives, they will have greater access than you ever will as project manager. However, you will need the help of your sponsor to make this strategy work. One of the best ways to get deputies involved is to create a Working Committee. This is the best way to get the business involved and to keep various stakeholders aligned with the project.

The Working Committee

In my experience over the years, a critical success factor for any project is for the business to “own” the project. It could be the operations people, the sales people, or the back office support staff. To get that involvement, I like to implement a Working Committee of people from the affected commercial parts as defined in the Business Case for the project. They are the people who will be responsible for delivering business results after the project is completed. These people may come from all areas of the business. For any given project, the Working Committee might come from sales, marketing, information technology, accounting, and so on. After you have completed your stakeholder analysis, you should work with your sponsor to invite key stakeholders to nominate a member for the Working Committee. The people who I would like to see involved are the deputies of the executive stakeholders. Recall in Chapter 6, when we looked at classifying stakeholders. I want to attract as many as possible from the Influencer category who also have credibility with the Authority category.

Whom to Look For

When I am looking for people to serve on the committee, they are usually at the director level in the organization and report directly to a vice president or similar officer of the company. The reason I want these people is they are still involved enough with the day-to-day operations that they know how the work really gets done in the company. Many times, vice presidents have been removed from seeing how the daily grind actually takes place. However, because these people report to the VP, that executive trusts their judgment and decisions.

What the Working Committee Does

There is a reason they are labeled as a Working Committee. They actually do work on the project—but not on the tasks from the Work Breakdown Structure. This is the decision-making arm of the project team. Unlike a Steering Committee that meets once a month or once a quarter for a briefing, this committee may meet once a week. Their job is to consider options presented by the project team and make decisions.

Over the years, I have learned that there is rarely one technical way to address an issue or problem. Most of the time, the technical people on my team will choose what they deem to be the best technical answer. Unfortunately, the option they choose may not also be the best option for the business. My team members may not be in a position to understand the impact on certain parts of the business even if they are business analysts with extensive experience.

For example, in one systems project I was managing, the vendor came out with a new and improved module that the sales team really wanted. Unfortunately, we had been working on the project for several months, and it would be a major change in scope for the project if we now included the new module. On the surface, it appeared we could make the change to the new module with a delay of only a few months. However, when we took the idea to the Working Committee, the accounting and the scheduling people both had a strong reaction to the change. What was not apparent to the sales team or to the project team was that the proposed changes would have consequences at the back office end of the workflow. After a lengthy discussion in the Working Committee, a decision was made to delay the module and include it in a later enhancement to the system.

This was the value of the Working Committee! The business stakeholders made the decision about the change, not the project team. Each of the members of the committee was able to discuss the decision with their constituencies and defend the decision. The sales director was able to explain and defend the decision to the sales team with a solid understanding of the consequences to other parts of the business. The accounting and scheduling people could communicate with their people to demonstrate that the project team and the Working Committee were considering and protecting their interests.

Now take that scenario and multiply it over dozens of technical decisions, and I think you can see that, when the project was finished, we received very little resistance to the changes we were making with the new system.

Going back to the involvement of the sponsor, you will probably require the help of your sponsor to get this level of people involved in the Working Committee. To make these types of decisions, you will need the best people you can get. The problem is that these same individuals are recognized by others as the top technical people in their area so they are probably already working on other initiatives for the business. Your sponsor will undoubtedly need to negotiate with his peers to get those A-level people assigned to your project.

Also recognize that these same people will probably be asked to perform their “day jobs” at the same time. You must also understand that, unless they are seconded to the project, their day-to-day work will always take precedent over the tasks of the Working Committee. When those competing priorities collide, you will need the help of your sponsor in working with their peers to create some space for the Working Committee members to participate.

How to Use the Working Committee

As the Figure 12.1 illustrates, you will need to communicate to the sponsor how you intend to utilize the Working Committee.

Figure 12.1: The Process for Decision Making within the Working Committee

As illustrated in the earlier example, the Working Committee can also be a valuable part of your communication plan. One of the “duties” of Working Committee members is to keep their constituents engaged and informed about the project.

When I use the term engaged, I want to turn back to the module example. When the Working Committee was preparing to make a decision about the new module, what I asked each member to do was to confer with key people in their groups and get their opinion or reaction to the suggested changes. There is a dual purpose in that strategy. First, the Working Committee member is keeping the business informed as to what is going on. Also, the member is asking for their opinion. This can be valuable because often people in the business will recognize consequences that even a knowledgeable member of the Working Committee does not see.

How It Plays into the Politics

Remember from Chapter 1 that the politics at the highest level demand that the sponsor have the project under control. As you can imagine, one of the worst situations for a sponsor, politically, is to be confronted by a peer about an issue and the sponsor was not aware of the issue. You are mitigating most political risks to the sponsor by using a Working Committee.

The sponsor can use the diagram in Figure 12.1 to explain to her peers how the process of decision making works within the project. She can illustrate, correctly, that it is really the business that makes the key technical decisions on the project.

The sponsor can also clarify for her peers that the Working Committee member who represents their constituents should be conferring with those people as part of the input related to decisions.

Finally, it creates an impression that perhaps the other executive, not the sponsor, is the one who is being surprised by their people in relation to the project.

Believe me when I tell you that, by using this strategy, you are building a strong ally in the sponsor. You have created a model of how the project works that gives the sponsor confidence in dealing with peers. That is huge.

It is huge because the sense of allegiance is an emotional trait, not an intellectual one. When these situations play out and give the sponsor a sense of confidence in what you are doing, believe me when I tell you that the sponsor will defend you during the tough times in the project.

To illustrate from my own experience, I had a project with a Working Committee set up exactly as described here. My sponsor was the chief operating officer of a global software company. We were about three-quarters of the way through the project when one of the division presidents confronted my sponsor about the consequences of a technical decision made for the project. Honestly, it was a complete surprise to me and to my sponsor. I apologized but also explained that we had followed the protocol for decision making exactly as agreed to earlier. I suggested that I needed to investigate and see what happened or what went wrong.

Without going into all the details of my investigation, what I found out was disappointing but not altogether surprising. It seemed that the Working Committee member had not followed the protocol agreed to at the beginning of the project. The practice we had all agreed to was that, when the Working Committee members had to make a decision for the project, they would:

1.Discuss the issue with members of their constituency.

2.Review the options presented by the project team, including risks and benefits.

3.Essentially come to a collective agreement to present to the project team.

As can often happen, the Working Committee member, who happened to be a vice president, did not confer with his people. As is often the case, he was very busy with travel and operational issues and ran out of time. Since the project timeframe required an answer, the vice president gave the answer he thought the team would recommend. Unfortunately, he guessed incorrectly. As can happen in these types of situations, the vice president thought he could tag the project with the failure to implement the correct solution. However, based on the evidence from the investigation, I knew that was not what happened.

Now, I could have thrown the vice president under the bus because that was what he was trying to do to me! However, once I knew what had really happened, I met with the vice president, and we discussed what I had learned. As you can imagine, he decided it was in everyone’s (mostly his) best interest to correct the situation with his boss, the president of the division. Together, we worked on an explanation that would let him save face but also clear the project team of any perception of not working in the best interests of the business.

When I reviewed all that had happened with my sponsor, he was delighted. It meant that the division president, someone he suspected was after his job, did not have any grounds for tagging him with a project that was out of control. He also knew that he had some information he could save and use later that perhaps the division president did not have his own house in order if this kind of thing could happen on his watch.

You might read these words and be disappointed that businesses and people could operate this way. However, this is really what happens. You have undoubtedly had something happen to you that you knew was political in nature, but you had no recourse. The approach I am suggesting, using deputies effectively in the project, is a way to help you mitigate and/or avoid those situations. Now you do have recourse but only if you follow the process.

There is always the temptation to take shortcuts when time is precious. Let this be a cautionary story for you to recognize that the use of a Working Committee will take longer in some cases but allow the process to do the job of engaging the business in your project.

Points to Remember

Use a Working Committee to keep the business engaged.

Look for people the executive team members trust and rely on for advice.

Structure the Working Committee to to actually work on the project, not just advise, make decisions and provide quality assurance of the project team’s work.

Recognize the value of a Working Committee in managing office politics.