Photography: Sylt August by knudsburg
With large groups and a lot of time pressure you don’t always spend enough effort in communicating the overall perspective of the project. Too bad, because emphasizing the “bigger picture” helps stakeholders to keep in line and, if done properly, enhance motivation among the team (they wanna be part of something cool). Here are two tips to save you time and help you out in this department.
A. Use Doug DeCarlo’s Project Skinny
This is a 3-sentence “mission statement” for your project as introduced by Doug DeCarlo in his excellent book “Extreme Project Management“. Put it out for everyone to see. Put it on the first page of the project document templates.
- Sentence 1: Who will do what for whom?
- Sentence 2: When is the project considered to be finished?
- Sentence 3: What are Objectives of the end result?
B. Use a project management tool
… that generates a short summary that can be accessed by all stakeholders through the Internet or Intranet. It should at least provide a short summary of the goals. When using ProjectPlace.com you can offer a web page that describes the objective, scope and major deliverables, what is out of scope, and which milestones are roughly passed.
Paint the Bigger Picture. Keep it small. Keep it simple. And put it for everyone to see.
Tags: Books, decarlo, gadgets, goals, how-to, projectplace, stakeholders, techniques
One Comment
Have you tried using SmartDraw for project management charts like workflows, gantt charts, timelines, schedules, etc? It works really well. You can download a free trial at http://www.smartdraw.com/specials/project-software.htm. Hope this is helpful!