Animate your projects!

Written by Arnaud Bonneville

What's your management style? If you ever experienced training in project management or in human skills development, you have surely come to this tremendous question. I don't want to go through the management styles theory, or discuss about classical motivation theories. The purpose of this article is to explain how I involved my project team and achieved a high level of motivation among project stakeholders.

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Project Management theory says: the project manager should be a leader. Sure. But there are several ways to lead the project and to achieve a desired results. The way I have chose is the participative project management. To reach this target, I had to work it out in several steps, that I will describe now.

1. The project kick-off

The project kick-off is one of the most important meetings of the project. You have to carefully prepare it.

1.1 When should we organize this meeting?

In majority of cases, when you organize your project kick-off, its... too late. In all my earlier projects, I worked out the project plan alone, go to the decision gate to launch the project, and then invoked a project kick-off with my project team. Now I'm sure that it's a mistake. Because your project tea did not participate to the project plan preparation in the early stages, you lose one important way to involve your team in the project. It is easy to understand: you're much more motivated to realize something that you have designed than to realize the idea of another guy.

So my first advice to motivate your project team is to organize the kick-off before the launch decision gate.

1.2 Who should I invite to this meeting?

The immediate question that comes after this first conclusion is : how can I invite my project team as the project is not launched, and this team not appointed yet? You're right.
In my former projects, I got a team only after the project launch. For my current project, I had the chance to be involved at the opportunity study stage. Thus, I have asked to the management to appoint representatives of each concerned department in the organization.
But I recognize that the project manager has not always the chance to proceed that way, and that his appointment is made after the opportunity study. In the latter case, the project manager should ask to the management the appointment of a core team, whose mission will be to work out the project plan.

1.3 What should be discussed during the kick-off?

Of course the first topic to do is a round table and let each stakeholder present him/herself. You can take the opportunity to ask, during this round table, what's the experience they have on former projects, and if they were already part of a project team.

Then, it's your turn to speak. You need to describe the project, its purpose, its objectives and deadlines. This presentation part should take one hour maximum, otherwise they may easily fall asleep!

And then? Then, you should let them work! This kick-off meeting is the right place to organize brainstorming sessions about the project. Depending on the number of participants, you can divide the room in several groups (3-4 people per group). The brainstorming sessions should have a maximum duration of 40 minutes. Just immediately after, put all ideas in common and issue a brainstorming synthesis. Here is a set of subjects they can work on :

Identify project deliverables - good start to prepare your scope statement, isn't it? -
Identify project risks - the risk identification process is very important to be done through such brainstorming sessions -
Identify communication actions to perform - and issue a first draft communications plan -.

And here we are! At the end of the day, your team is aware of the project, they know each other, they already worked together during the brainstorming, and they participated to the first steps of the project plan.

Don't forget to finish the day with practical information: where will the project information be stored? When will the review meetings take place? And most of all: immediately launch working groups, and ask for volunteers. You should not be the leader of each working group, but one of the volunteers should volunteer to lead the group.

If you do all this stuff, you have sowed the seeds. Now all you need is to regularly sprinkle them!

2. The working groups

Now that your working groups have been settled, you need to defined objectives and deadlines for each working group. I suggest that you participate at least to the first meeting, provided that you don't take the lead on the topic but just remind at the beginning why this group has been created, its contribution to your project and the expected deliverables.

Encourage all the groups to share their results as soon as possible, and not only after the last meeting, and to publish them in your project management information system or shared project location.

Encourage them also to notify all team members of their new publications, even in draft mode, to let everybody share the same information.

Then, don't forget to follow-up the group results... this is one reason why you need to settle regular project review meetings!

3. The review meetings

The review meetings should take place regularly, once a week in the planning and conception phases, twice per month during the execution phase. Settle a maximum duration of one hour and define a standard agenda.

For my project, the agenda I use for such review meeting is the following:

Project information - Information shared to the team by the project manager
Working groups status - Information shared by each group leader
Current issues and action plan - If someone faces a problem, he/she sould raise it at this stage
Risk review - Discuss new identified risks or inform of closed risks
Round table - Free expression if needed.

Here are some hints for these review meetings:

Start on time (max 5 minutes delay)
Don't force all team members to be present, they can send their update by mail before the meeting
Send the minutes the same day to all team members, even those who missed the meeting
Let people talk and express their concerns
Motivate shy people to give their feedbacks by questionning them directly !

With such an organization, I currently manage to maintain a high level of motivation among my project team, though some members do not participate as I want... In fact, some people stay aside from the project time, and I don't see them anymore. It's time then to discuss with their management if they cannot replace them by somebody else!

Arnaud Bonneville, PMP

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