A Key Question To Ask Project Sponsors & Major Business Stakeholders

Regular readers of my blog know that I teach project management courses at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I kind of fell into lecturing as a sideline some years back and enjoy it very much because not only do I enjoy teaching "real world" topics to adult professionals, I learn as much from them as I give, even in introductory courses such as the one I completed yesterday.

Here's an example of an 'a-ha' moment I had with my students at the beginning of the course Monday morning. For the first hour or so, we talk about and define projects, project managers, and project management in the context of going forward with the methodology that we teach in the program. I also spend a fair amount of time explaining the relationship between project managers and various project constituancies such as project sponsors and major stakeholders.

After this we have an exercise where the students (in groups) take 20 minutes and brainstorm what they as PMs must have from sponsors & stakeholders, and what would be nice to have, but not critical to project success. Each group puts their findings on an easel and I debrief each group to conclude the exercise.

A group of three very intelligent students came up with a question to ask sponsors and stakeholders as a 'must-have' that, while I've heard it before in other contexts, never equated with requirements gathering/analysis and project planning:

"Please tell me what 'done' looks like to you with respect to this project."

What an awesomely succinct and powerful question! It gets right to the heart of the matters at hand in this project phase and the answer(s) you get are critical with respect to what you do and say next.

Scenario 1 is a focused, bullet-like list of objectives with little ambiguity. This is the best possible answer you'll ever receive from sponsors because you can proceed right into developing the project plan with clear-cut objectives. Unfortunately, this scenario is very rare in practice.

Scenario 2 is a list of objectives with a fair amount of unknowns and ambiguity. You have more work to do with these folks fleshing out enough for you to work with in starting the planning.

Scenario 3 is a very broad, currently unfocused vision of an outcome that needs much more work to go from half-baked to something you can work with. Much more thought and work is required to get the vision into a state that leads to the project planning process, and you help and support the sponsor getting to that point.

Always ask this question of your sponsors and major stakeholders up front, and never in a condecending or abrupt manner, but more one of support and empathy if elements of the project aren't completely formed yet. A powerful question asked like this up-front and the answers you receive will spare you, the project, and your organiation much time, angst, and money in the long run.