18

Using the Sponsor to Gain Operations Support

FIRST OF ALL, let’s review the key requirements for persuading operations to accept the deliverables from your project: expertise and authority. In addition to these absolute requirements, there are two more:

1.Providing operations with any training that will be needed to be successful

2.Communicating how they will be evaluated on performance after implementation

In actual fact, you could almost think of these latter two requirements as two separate projects that run on parallel tracks until the end of the project. See Figure 18.1.

Figure 18.1: Dual Perspective on Operations Readiness

Providing the Training That Operations Needs to Be Ready

Very often project managers take a superficial look at training and ask the question, “What will people need to know to make the project work?” I would suggest that executing the training plan should focus on this question instead: “What will people need to be able to do in order to make the project successful?” Focusing on doing rather than on knowing is a critical difference. It changes the paradigm from a learning solution to a job-related solution. Basically, people do work, and hence the focus on doing rather than knowing. Follow a plan for functional training and competency training during the project execution.

Developing the Content

Here is where your sponsor can help you by recruiting people who are seen as experts and/or highly successful by others in the company—the “stars.” You will need training professionals who are experts in their own right, but they often need content help from others. The stars can be the people who do quality assurance and who provide input on the content of training to make certain it is achieving the doing versus the knowing.

However, you will likely need the help of your sponsor to involve these stars. The reason is quite simple in concept but much more difficult to execute. These are the stars in the business, so they are usually involved in other initiatives and not just your project (not to mention that they also have their day-jobs to perform).

In business and in football, it takes a lot of unspectacular preparation to produce spectacular results.

Roger Staubach, Football Hall of Fame
and successful real estate businessman

When these people are within the span of control of your sponsor, you may have an easier time recruiting them because your executive can negotiate their participation in the project a bit more easily. I use the words “a bit more easily” because even though their senior manager wants their participation, their direct supervisor will fight hard to resist if at all possible. You have to keep in mind that these stars and their supervisors are where most of the operational work is actually accomplished in running the business from day to day. Their operations supervisor will see big risks in having them assigned to still another initiative.

One way to ease the resistance by a star’s supervisor is to work a strategic approach to the situation.

1.First of all, find out what other initiatives the star you want is working on.

2.Second, determine, as best you can, how these other initiatives rank in importance to the business compared to your project.

3.Finally, attempt to determine whether there is a way to reduce their day-job workload so they can spend the time required on your project.

If you take these steps, you now have the knowledge you need to negotiate with:

Your sponsor initially, and

The star’s supervisor if the sponsor approves.

You can use the same techniques for recruiting people from other parts of the company outside the span of authority of your sponsor, but recognize that those negotiations will be much more difficult. For your sponsor to request time from another executive’s team will require that you have a very clear role for the star, along with an accurate assessment of exactly how much time you will be demanding from the star.

In my years of running projects, I have seldom had an executive not offer to support my project with their people. I request the help and they agree. However, if I explain to my sponsor that I will need this expert for two days per week for four months, we have a very different conversation. I am confident you will understand why.

Your sponsor will also need this type of estimate when they begin negotiating with a peer for one of their stars. However, you must provide one other consideration to your sponsor as part of your request for a star—whether in their group or another.

You must provide your sponsor with the risk involved in not having these key people involved in our project. You can explain it in terms of:

Schedule because without their expertise it will take longer to get activities completed.

Quality, because the deliverable will not be as robust as it might be if they were involved

Budget, because without the expertise from the company, you may need to hire a contractor or business analyst with that expertise

All of the above

This is another area where I think we as project managers must understand the facts of life discussed in Chapter 1. Believe me when I tell you that the senior management did not even think about this factor when they sanctioned the project—at least in most cases.

Delivering the Content

Sometimes these stars have the platform skills that they can actually help deliver the training in the use of the deliverables. In these situations, I have had my training specialist conduct a series of workshops to train the trainer and give them the skills they will need. Your training specialist can help structure the workshops to help them with delivery and how-to knowledge about things like answering questions. In my experience, most of these stars, if they have the basic platform skills, will actually enjoy training others. It provides a lot of positive feedback to them about the admiration and respect that others have for them.

For those stars who do not have the platform skills, you can still use them effectively in the workshops. In this situation, you pair them with a professional trainer, and the star acts in support of the trainer. The professional trainer will deliver the content through presentations or demonstrations. Sometimes trainees will ask those tricky what-if questions that might be beyond the knowledge of the trainer. In such instances, the star is there to answer those tough questions and help the participants understand how to apply the training by utilizing examples that all will recognize.

Either approach takes an enormous amount of planning and coordination, so do not underestimate the complexity of either approach. Either you or your trainer will need to develop a detailed schedule to ensure the availability of both your stars and the participants themselves.

Finally, you will probably need your sponsor to help you encourage people to attend training. In my experience, the day-to-day operations always seem to get in the way of training people. Sometimes it is just demands on their time, and other times it is just people making excuses because they do not want to attend.

Using Authority to Deliver Training

When people are making excuses not to attend, this is when persuasion by authority is appropriate. In this case, I am assuming that training is mandatory as part of the handover to operations. If training is not mandatory, be sure to include potential risks in your project reviews with the sponsor. It goes back to the “no surprises rule.” For people within the span of control of your sponsor, the sponsor must let managers know that people are expected to attend the training. Even with that, a couple of managers may not pay attention, so keeping a close eye on who is attending and who is not is very helpful. It is very dangerous for your project’s success to assume, “If they don’t show up, it’s their problem.” It is not: It is your problem, and you need your sponsor to help.

The sponsor may also need to prod his peers if the people who report to them are not showing up for training. Because there is no line of authority control, your sponsor will have to be the one to handle the situation. If you are asking the sponsor to get involved, you need to provide him with two key pieces of information:

1.The numbers of people who have attended from various departments or groups

2.The contrast of the numbers between other departments and these executives’ departments

The comparison of numbers hits that nerve in executives where they want to appear in control in their operations groups. Having data is the best way to break through the resistance to act.

Performance Evaluation and Project Deliverables

One of the biggest obstacles a project manager faces in preparing operations is anchored in the concept of whether the deliverables from a project are mandatory or optional once they move into day-to-day operations. In my work over the years doing systems projects, that has been a real struggle. In most cases, use of the new system was seen by senior management and by my sponsor as mandatory. However, users often saw the system as optional. In my projects, the legacy system had flaws, and people built work-arounds to compensate for its shortcomings. Perhaps not surprisingly, even though the new system would address many of those flaws, people seemed to want to continue to use the tools (usually spreadsheets) that they had developed. I think the reason was they felt more confidence in something they had built versus something that was given to them.

This is another discussion with your sponsor on accountability for actually utilizing your project deliverables after they are put into operations. The key question is really whether the use of a new deliverable and associated business practice will become part of the performance evaluation. As we all know, if people are not evaluated on something related to their performance, they tend to ignore it.

That being said, please remember that if the use of a new process, procedure, or system is going to be part of the performance evaluation, you will need to get the human resources people into the conversation. For most organizations, changing the performance evaluation scheme is notoriously difficult and will require your sponsor to be involved with or supportive of that expectation. Otherwise, it will not happen.

One of the hardest lessons . . . to internalize is the primacy of departmental loyalties and self-interest over organization-wide concerns.

Jeffery K. Pinto,
Power and Project Management

Preparing operations for the project deliverables is both difficult and time-consuming. However, the effort and time invested in preparing operations properly will be critical to how the project is ultimately judged.

Points to Remember

The sponsor must be involved in order to gain support from operations.

Use company stars to ensure the quality of training and perhaps even to engage in the delivery of training.

Use your sponsor’s or other senior executives’ authority to guarantee that people attend training.

Work with the sponsor on whether performance evaluations need to change as a result of your project deliverables.