Learn how to fix three common project management mistakes.

Jami, hello and welcome to our impactful projects and Planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani, and in today's session, we'll talk about how to fix three common project mistakes. So in my work with clients and in talking with folks leading projects in nonprofits and other mission driven organizations, I often see project managers make some common mistakes. I've made them myself these projects and these mistakes are costing project managers and their stakeholders time, and they also can really impact project success, and so luckily, many of these mistakes are pretty easily fixed. So let's talk about three of those mistakes, why they matter and how we can fix them. And so the first common mistake I see is that stakeholder roles are not clear. The next mistake is that you haven't planned for Project communications. And the third is that your tasks are not tied to your deliverables. So let's dive in to this first mistake. And so your pro your stakeholder roles in the project are not clear. So our stakeholders are anyone who's going to be impacted by the project work or the project's outcomes or deliverables. And so when I'm working with project managers, I often ask them to identify their project stakeholders and what role those stakeholders should play. What I tend to hear is about the role the stakeholder plays, either in or with their organization. And so I may hear that they're a manager, they're the finance person, they're a member of the marketing team, they're a client or a user, but that isn't the same as their project role. And so project roles really should clarify how an individual stakeholder or group should contribute to or engage with a project. And so while someone's organizational role will likely influence the role that they play on a project, we still want to clearly define their project role. And so without clear project roles, your team members and stakeholders won't know what is expected of them, which can lead to a lack of engagement, creating delays and endangering the success of your project, or you end up throwing everyone onto one sort of large project team that is unwieldy to manage, and often can create confusion about who is going to be responsible for what during the project? And so let's talk about some common project roles in nonprofit and mission driven organizations that you might want to assign to your stakeholders. And so many projects will have a sponsor or funder role. So these are folks supporting or advocating for the project. This could be a leader in your organization, or someone from a partner organization or a funding organization. These folks are often key decision makers. There's you as the project manager. This is the person herding the cats, as they say, you may also want to have an advisory committee, and so this can be a group of folks who are going to give input to the project. They may advise you, as the project manager, on how the project should go, or they may be providing feedback as you design and develop your deliverables. Advisory committees are really useful ways to engage with representatives of different stakeholder groups without adding all of them to the core project team. We typically have project team members, of course, and these are those core folks who are doing the bulk of the work on the project. But we may also want to have Project Contributors. These are folks who may just have one or a few key tasks throughout the project, but don't necessarily need to come to every team meeting or be a member of that core project team. You might also want to have subject matter experts who are consulted during the project. Again, not everyone needs to be part of that core project team. We usually have users or clients, and these are whoever is going to be using whatever it is that our. Project is creating, but we can also have informed stakeholders, and so these folks will probably see a limited impact from the project or the deliverables that we're creating, but we still want to keep them informed about the project. So this could be your community, this could be board members, this could be colleagues from another department. And so as you can see from this list, not all stakeholders need an equal role or need equal input into the project, but we do still want to make sure we're considering all of our stakeholders so that our project is more successful. And so assigning clear and specific roles can really help with this. And so what, what we're thinking about when we're thinking about these roles is that we don't, again, have to put everybody on, you know, a large project team, this can be very unwieldy. You know, even trying to get everyone's schedules together, trying to find a room where we can all meet, can be very, very challenging. And so by assigning roles, you're engaging with the right people at the right time. And so another common mistake that I see is that we haven't planned for Project communication. I see this one a lot stakeholder and communication planning go hand in hand. So as you start thinking about your project stakeholders and the roles that they're going to play that is a great time to start planning for Project communication. While I love project management tools, I often hear project managers say that their communication plan is the tool, and so they'll say, Oh, my plan is we're going to adopt or use Asana or Monday or smart sheet, or whatever it is to communicate. Now, this may work really well for that internal core project team, but what about all your external stakeholders? How will they even get access to the tool? What will folks who maybe have little experience or rarely use these tools do, what about all those meetings and newsletters and social media and all of the other ways that we need to communicate and so they engage, the engagement that we need to make sure our projects are really successful. Require intentional communication that is appropriate for each stakeholder based on their role. So we need a plan. There are lots of approaches to planning project communication, but a simple strategy is to answer this question, who needs to know what about your project and how and when will they need to know it, and so the who and the what, of course, is directly tied to our list of stakeholders in their roles. So our focus in communication planning is on the how and the when is the project management tool or an email or a meeting or a report or a social media post, what we need at what point in the project, or how often will you provide folks with that information. So for example, our project may have a client or a user we are building our deliverables for. Let's say there are who we want to get feedback from them on their specific needs. That's our what. So how are we going to do this? Maybe we decide we're going to send out a survey via email, and we're going to send it out at a particular point in the project, perhaps early on, before we start building these deliverables. So that's our who, what, how and when. We can map out the who, what, how and when for each of our stakeholders, creating an actionable plan for our project communications that make sure we have the right people getting the right information at the right time, so that they can really actively engage with our project. Intentional communication is critical to project success, so give it the attention it deserves and plan for it. And finally, another common mistake I see is that your tasks aren't tied to your deliverables. And so what I mean by this is that what I see project managers doing when they start project planning

is they start creating this long, long list of tasks. So first we're going to do this, then that, then that, then that, but maybe we're going to do this before that, or then that. And so this gets complicated very, very quickly. Tasks can overlap. Some tasks are very small and some tasks are very big. And so for our team members and our. Contributors, when we have this long list of tasks, it can be really hard for them to see the purpose of their work and why their task or tasks really matter when it's buried in this long list of sort of unrelated tasks, this makes engagement tricky. It also makes accountability tricky. So what can we do? What we can do is start our task planning with deliverables. And so deliverables are really those tangible or concrete outcomes of our project. It's what our project is going to create, build, design, produce or accomplish. And so once we know our deliverables, we can break each deliverable down into smaller and smaller elements. By breaking our deliverables down into smaller pieces, we get to activities and tasks that we can actually assign to someone and that we can track progress on. Let's look at an example. So let's say we are working on a project to create a new employee onboarding experience. We might identify four project deliverables, a needs assessment report, a documented program that we're going to be delivering, the content for that program, and an implementation plan, so we can start breaking each of these deliverables into smaller or smaller pieces until we get to tasks. And so let's say for the needs assessment report, we might break it into four tasks. We're going to gather data, we're going to conduct interviews, we're going to analyze needs, and we're going to create a report. Now, obviously we could break these further into sub tasks if we wanted, but what we're trying to do here is get to the level where we can assign the tasks to someone with a due date, and to the level we want to track completion and progress on. And so connecting tasks to deliverables can really create this clear line between the work that you're asking people to do and the desired outcomes. So this really helps your stakeholders understand the purpose of their work and how it contributes to overall project goals, helping to support, buy in to doing the project and accountability. I don't just have a few tasks on a long task list. I am creating something that is going to help us build this specific deliverable. By linking tasks to deliverables you can cross also create your schedules more easily, because we are working with a subset of tasks, rather than trying to consider a whole project's worth of tasks. And so this can also help you deal with overlapping tasks, right? Because often there are things we can be doing while we're doing something else. Of course, once we've split our deliverables into tasks and given them due dates, we can look at the whole project schedule, but we aren't trying to sort of order a long list of tasks all at once and then finally, linking tasks to deliverables also helps us track progress more effectively as your tasks are completed, you and your stakeholders can see how they contribute to the completion of specific deliverables. Alright, so those were a few common project mistakes and how to fix them. We want to make sure we're signing clear project roles. We want to plan for Project communication, and we want to tie our tasks to deliverables. All of these strategies really can come together to help you create clarity that drives engagement and project success before I take questions. You might be interested in our communication planning worksheet to help with that, who, what, how and when of project communication planning, this free download of our simple worksheet is a great start to both stakeholder and communication planning, and is available at YazdaniConsulting.com/resources. If you need support leading projects, visit our project solutions page at YazdaniConsulting.com/projects to learn about how I can help. All right, so I'm happy to take questions you have about projects and these common mistakes. Please add them in the comments. I'll give folks a few moments to add their questions. If I'm not able to answer the question live, I'm happy to respond later in the comments. You can also find all of the ways to contact me at YazdaniConsulting.com/contact. Please reach out to me if you'd like to talk about projects. Okay, so a question is, who should assign roles to stakeholders? Is it the project manager? So yes, assigning stakeholder roles usually falls to the project manager, but it's not necessarily something that we need to do on. On our own, in isolation, and so it may be helpful to work with an internal project sponsor to assign roles. Once you've also identified that core project team, you probably also want to run your stakeholder list and their roles by that group. You can also share the communication plan with them, because they may be able to identify stakeholders you've missed, or they may have a better strategy to suggest for communication, I would also say that you want to make sure that your stakeholders, particularly team members, contributors, committee members, subject matter experts, are actually available to fill the role that you've assigned them. You may want to assign someone to your core project team, but once you talk to them, figure out that they really only have the time to be a contributor, a committee member, a subject matter expert. And so I found that if folks know that they have some role, they are often more on board with the project. Sometimes you find that you've assigned someone to a committee or to a contributor role, and they really want something more than that. But often, if they know they have some role in the project, they're okay with that role, alright? So feel free to comment or reach out with any additional questions, and thank you for participating in our impactful projects and Planning series. Visit YazdaniConsulting.com/IPP to view all of the sessions in the series for recordings of previous sessions as well as upcoming sessions. Thank you. Thank.