Talk the Talk &

Walk the Walk

How Effective Conversation Improves Project Management

Success

Today’s Conversation

- Show you new ways to approach conversations that will:

- Help you be more effective personally

- improve the performance of your project teams

Project Issues Today

• Issue 1: Work has changed from mass production to knowledge work

• Issue 2: Projects are important, increasing in frequency and complexity…and hard to do well

• Issue 3: Our common sense methods of managing work has its roots in mass production and process theories of management

• Issue 4: Projects are done by humans. Humans aredifferent than machines and must bemanaged differently

• Issue 5: On human projects, it is more important tomanage learning and commitment thanprocess

Projects

Idea ActionableRequest

FunctionalDeliverable

Production Capability

Conversation is the basic technology for business improvement

Historically about improving business process

Today they are the business – when people are involved every instance is unique

What is a conversation? The use of language to exchange thoughts, ideas or information

Conversation

One of the continual challenges we face in projects is being able to generate meaning in others that ensures we get the responses we want

Projects are conversations

What are the business rules?

What is needed to achieve our

business goals?

Whose job will this be?

What is the right process?

Where should we put the servers?

How will we validate

everything?

What do the customers and

end-users want?

How will we account for

this?

How does this interact with the

other parts of the system?

Technology

ProcessPeople Customers

Business

Conversation

Where do we intervene to improve?

Manage the Transfer of Knowledge

Formalize process and standards to address all

possibilities

Conversation

Private Conversations – How We Participate in Making MeaningPrivate Conversations, or Narratives, form Personal

Meaning

I wouldn’t do things this way.

He doesn’t know what he’s

talking about!

This project is a waste of time!!

I’m not sure I want to help

with this. Nobody

understands my story.

My wife and kids are mad at me.

The Other Participant

The Project

Ourselves

Our Mood and Other

Concerns

How things “ought to be”

Conversation Theory – the real conversationPrivate Conversations

from Personal Meaning

Private Conversations from Personal Meaning

Shared Meaning and Distinctions

(Mental Models)

Background of Obviousness

Content Conversation

Conversation Theory AppliedPrivate Conversations

from Personal Meaning

Private Conversations from Personal Meaning

Shared Meaning and Distinctions

(Mental Models)

Background of Obviousness

Change our personal narratives about conversations

(meta conversation)

Does this work?

• Establishing new ways to converse allows methods of interaction to emerge that are more effective than trying to formalize the process

• Responsibility elevates when both participants have understanding and accountability for the success of the conversations

Lean: Eliminate Conversations Rework

Idea ActionableRequest

FunctionalDeliverable

Production Capability

Is this what you wanted?

Rework

Rework kills the pace of delivery and compromise reduces business value delivered and feels like broken promises

Having conversations for understanding to early or too late creates rework and compromise No, you must

have misunderstood

Lean: Improve Conversation Flow

Idea ActionableRequest

FunctionalDeliverable

Production Capability

What are the business rules

again?

Waiting

Delays kill the productivity of resources by increasing the number of open issues and increasing confusionIncreases stress, moves big chunks of delivery to the end of the project, and dramatically slows down delivery

Not having clear conversations, early enough, leads to delays

Conversation Theory Applied

• Three areas where this theory achieves tremendous results– Common Understanding– Competing Concerns– Coordination of Action (Promising)

Common Understanding - Applied

• Gain agreement that the end result is a shared understanding of meaning

• Each participant articulates their understanding of the situation• Each participant listens to the understanding of others• Bring distinctions from the private conversations to the content

conversation.• Generate shared understanding of meaning and distinction• Keys:

– Structure this purposefully– Listen– Ask questions– Hold other participants as legitimate

• Over time, new ways of participating arise, creating more effective conversations

Competing Concerns - Applied

• Reasonable People Don’t Do Unreasonable Things– People always participate, consciously or

unconsciously, with a background commitment to take care of what matters to them.

• This is why crisis brings people together• The objective is to articulate the consequences,

relevant experiences, compromises, and fears that obstruct a course of action.

• Listening is not compromise, don’t sacrifice anything, find ways to identify and address both participants real concerns

Coordination of Action

Making a promise

Assessment

Setting the Context

Performance

Making a Promise – Applied• Both participants are responsible for making a

reliable promise.• Five elements of a responsible promise

– Sincere Intention– Accountable– Competence– Course of Action– Shared Meaning

• Ask both parties to specifically articulate agreement on all five points.

• When promises become slippery, figure out where the breakdown occurred and address it

Flow• View the conversations of projects as the work being performed.• Apply Lean and TOC concepts to the flow of conversations through

the organization.• Reducing the WIP, or the number of things that have to be talked

about, will greatly increase understanding and flow • Look to improve quality in • Look to reduce rework and waste

– Is work ready?– Do I understand done?– Do I an the next person in the flow have a common understanding of

how to do this best?– What is the next most important thing for me to work on in the context of

the project?– How do we account for uncertainty in estimates and understanding?

Getting Conversations Right

• Although each conversation seems to take longer, at the end of the day, reducing rework, delays, and conflict will greatly accelerate the pace of delivery of the project while reducing the personal and business costs

• Learning to listen to our private conversations, and taking responsibility for the success of the conversations we participate in, are keys to successful projects

Contact Information

Dennis Stevens

Founder & Managing Partner

Synaptus

A New Way of Thinking, A New Way of Doing

770-851-8025

dennis.stevens@synaptus.com

www.synaptus.com