successful project management - Commonwealth of Learning

• Quite apart from marshalling the relevant facts, what you say should be
logical and easy to follow. This you do by consciously making use of thought
connectors. These are words and phrases like: ‘however’, ‘in addition to’,
‘compared with’, ‘namely’, ‘compared to’, ‘first and foremost’, ‘lastly’, ‘in
conclusion’, ‘for example’, and many others. Do these sound familiar from
your school days?
• Somebody has said that brevity is the soul of wit. In presenting content, the
project manager is encouraged to be brief and to the point. The span of
attention for most people is short, so a yarn of stories can only dissuade
prolonged attention as can be judged from facial expressions and other
indicators.
• In a team meeting, underpin your opinions and facts with tangible evidence.
Facts and statistics are an instance of good tangible evidence. To illustrate,
the project manager who wants to encourage teamwork to ensure success of
the project might cite success rates of projects elsewhere. For example,
he/she might say that the Standish Group (www.standishgroup.com) has
found that only 17% of all software projects done in the USA meet their
original targets; 50% have their targets changed, meaning that they are
usually late and overspent; and the remaining 33% are actually cancelled,
that is they fail. This can be used to ask the team, at the commencement of a
project (a) what they make of the statistics; (b) what they think makes projects
fail; and (c) where they want to see their project among the three categories.
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