Twenty One Project Management Tips On How To Get Co-operation of Senior Management

What information should a project manager provide to his management? How would he gain the cooperation on the projects he is managing?

Here are some tips on this:

1. If you have Key Result Areas and processes defined in the organization, fair. If not, ask the management what information they want to know about the project and when they want to know it… record the answers and abide by it.
2. Make sure that your information is easily understandable – Make a habit to keep standard reporting format.
3. Whenever you send them charts, always explain the meaning of every chart element.
4. Be well equipped for each stumble upon.
5. Prior to management meetings, put your leg in their shoes. Meaning, ask yourself what do you want to know if you were them?
6. Help them listen to what you are saying – or regret with surprises later.
7. Make sure that the outcomes of the meetings goes to bottom.
8. Objective of any meeting should be deciding upon Action Items.
9. Be short and sweet!
10. Bad news is better than no news – communicate it as earliest as possible; don’t just wait to see if it gets converted into good one.
11. Never propose a problem without the solution. If you want to express your concern towards a problem, accompany it with one or more possible solutions – most management likes this approach.
12. Ask the management the best way to communicate; if they prefer Skype calls – Skype calls are great. If they prefer face to face meetings – face to face meetings are great. And, if they prefer Video conferencing – you know the answer…
13. Make sure you have updated project status of every project that you are taking care of – at least at high level.
14. Get management’s buy-in on when to escalate issues to the superiors.
15. Email subject line should be written after careful thought – bad email subject line means bad start of whatever you intend to communicate.
16. Some management like presentations which uses diagrams and pictorial views while the other like figures only – classify your management type and present it accordingly.
17. Presenting information using bulleted list rather than using paragraphs of long text is preferred.
18. Rapport is one of the pillars of NLP… and it works here as well – you can have an informal discussion (about anything!) over your car parking place or at an unexpected meeting at a movie theatre – such encounters help build rapport.
19. Constantly re-evaluate if your management trusts you – if you are trusted, try to get more of the same.
20. The best Agenda of the meeting is something like “Why we don’t need meetings to solve the problem” – help your management decreasing the number of meetings; this can be done if they are comfortable with visible project progress.
21. Make use of “Yes” and “No” words effectively – they contain a specific meaning.

See Also:

1. I’m not a project manager. Why do I need to learn project management?
2. Project Management Isn’t 7
3. Twenty Traits Of Software Project Sponsors Who Have The Power To Screw-up An Offshore Outsourcing Engagement