I was fortunate enough to receive the PMI Eric Jenett Project Management Excellence Award in 2017 (PMI, 2017). One of the project management students persons that I was coaching approached me mentioning about having seen the video (Rajagopalan, 2017) and was curious about what the Chief Experience Officer meant in connection with the relationship management in project management. I am capturing briefly my responses to this person.
When people think of managing relationships with project teams, customers, partners, and other stakeholders, l feel that they focus mainly on the soft skills. I don't feel soft skills is an appropriate term at all as it makes technical skills or analytical skills to be a hard skill. Technical solutions solve a business problem and analytical skills unearth patterns in both technical and business arena. Such division of domain specific skills is against the cross-functional skills. We all understand that technology is critical to business and business supports technology. If such symbiotic relationship is understood, then these skills should be called interpersonal skills. Once we recognize that, we focus our relationship on how we sail ("Solution Agents of Implementing Change") through enterprise environmental factors and organizations process assets. This is when we are becoming the "Chief Experience Officer (CEO).
So, what are the things a CEO (regardless of who you are in the organizational hierarchy) must think through when they suggest any change, implement any work, or experience something outside of the organization (like bringing new knowledge back to the team or organization, lowering total cost of ownership, experimenting a new way of working)?
- Understand the why this change or task is important. Connect with the business strategy and customer impact. I am sure everyone can understand the Stephen Covey's principle of "Start with the why".
- Evaluate what the impact of the pain points we solve (or not solve) for the organization or client. This area is where the concept of "risk management" is non-negotiable. Just like the message "If you see it, say it" in many public places promote everyone to be the 'eyes and ears' of managing order, everyone should be able to understand the principle tenets of risk management. The more one is able to assess the impact, the more it helps with prioritization of efforts.
- Ask ourselves how we make clients feel valued. Customers and clients are as smart as we are. Instead of thinking that our clients can't articulate requirements or customers change scope, understand why they did that and pivot accordingly. Always know that "No is not Never" and "Yes is not Now". Be able to rationalize both emotionally and logically with clients.
- Everyone of us should understand what is our unique value proposition. Just like the candidates are expected to differentiate themselves in the interview where one is different from the other candidates (like "Why should I hire you?"), we should always think of answering the unasked customer's question, "How are you different from the competition?" This question is not for sales but for everyone in the organization as value flows in all directions within organization to the client.
- Frequently, many think they are not sales person. Yes, sales requires a unique set of skills (one of which is handling objections). Nevertheless, everyone contributing to value creation should think of how we market our brand. Now, this marketing is not just about product marketing but how we worked together in value creation. Looking from this angle, we can see that different persona exists in the clients and so adjusting the message according to the person is important.
- Trust is a like bank account. It pays interests when we continuously invest it. It assesses us penalty when we don't follow through. Clients trust us because of what we invest in the relationship account. Like reaching out to tell our clients what they can do differently to accelerate time to market or how the competition is performing. They look up to us because we bring 'market intelligence' to them. Recall that "we are the face of the product and process" to them! And, that is gold! They appreciate us by coming to us in providing testimonials, acting as references, and supporting with up-and-cross-sales.
- It is also important to know that we may develop deeper roots within a client organization as we build on this "CEO mindset". While we may think we have superpowers to connect with different members of the client organization, it is important to understand our 'audience language'. Sometimes, we may be cross-functional with enough knowledge to talk with a technical member of the team as well as the management member of the team. That is great but challenges arise when we don't know what we don't know. So, understanding the audience language also means where we may need to augment our limitations with extended knowledge from other team members. So, relationship management also means we connect other members of the team with appropriate members of the client organization. This approach mitigates risks and builds the 'opportunity' surround-sound system.
- Last but not the least lies the intense focus on the story we want to tell! In each of these above interactions, we should focus on this story of how we started, how we progressed, and where we have landed. Furthermore, where we are going! Feedback is one part of this story telling process but there should be tangibles (like whitepaper, presentation in symposiums, testimonials, case study) should all emerge along with intangibles (working relationships, cross-partnership opportunities, references, etc.)
To me, this is what is the 2-step plan-do-study-act like cycle similar to how design-thinking works (double diamond) or the infinity loop is practiced in DevOps lifecycle.
The student I talked to walked with enough satisfaction! What about you? What do you think of my response? Anything you want to add, refine, or remove?
References
PMI (2017). PMI Eric Jenett Award Person of the Year. https://www.pmi.org/about/awards/winners/past-year/2017
Rajagopalan, S. (2017). PMI Eric Jenett Award Recipient video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kESHH2mVkdk
