Erasing Boundaries - Six Ways to Prioritize Projects

People: Address and Remove Impediments, Obstacles, and Blockers for the Team

Erasing Boundaries

As more projects have a global scope and scale, it's increasingly common for project professionals to manage stakeholders around the world, juggling time zones, technologies, languages and other location-specific challenges. How can project managers work most effectively in this diverse and complex environment? Here are four tips to improve global projects’ efficiency.

When Projects Span the Globe, Here's How to Keep Everyone on the Same Page

Understanding any limitations your remote teams face from the start helps you tailor your requests and anticipate problems. In-person visits are best: While there, you can take part in your team's meeting with your home office to experience it from their perspective. Being in their shoes will give you insights about improvements to make.

If a visit isn't possible, use videoconferencing or instant message video (after checking that this is acceptable) so you can learn more about your remote team members’ environment. Is it busy? Do people seem to get along well? Do team members walk in and out of the meeting room without notice? This information is invaluable to understand what might influence productivity and responsiveness.

In addition, pepper those stakeholders (or any colleague who travels there) with questions to identify any tangible workspace pain points. For example, are there any technological constraints? Internet speed and reliability can vary from one country to another, so don't assume all locations have universal services and equipment.

REALIZE REMOTE CONSTRAINTS

Establishing agreed-upon formats and languages for communication is a critical requirement to ensure an effective and uninterrupted flow of information across borders.

Communication on global teams often is done in English or a simplified form called Global English, but depending on the proficiency of project members, this can be an obstacle. Whether you are a native English speaker or not, articulating and slowing down helps to convey a clearer message and reduce the impact of accents. In addition, remove regional jargon and create a shared glossary of project abbreviations and common terms so all team members have a quick reference in a pinch.

Remember that idioms and metaphors might not translate across cultures and can hinder your message's meaning. Similarly, while humor can help lower stress or conflicts, it can be counterproductive if the meaning isn't universally understood or appreciated. Hint: If you're the only one laughing, can the jokes.

Ultimately, one-on-one meetings ensure the clearest communication. But when, due to lack of time or resources, you have to deliver group messages, such as an email or presentation to the entire team, check later to confirm everyone understood it. You might find you'll need to present the slides again to a smaller audience where remote colleagues feel more comfortable asking questions. Reiteration makes perfection.

COMMUNICATE TO BUILD TRUST

Collaborative tools are great, because they help centralize information, bring everyone onto the same page and reinforce a shared understanding of the project. But before implementing any tool, make sure it aligns with local regulations and corporate culture. If training for the tool is needed, advocate for it to the human resources team.

Beyond the tools, collaboration also can involve highlighting the value and strengths of each team member in the global project and their unique contributions to project success. Celebrating birthdays or other important events is another way to help reinforce a trusting relationship.

REINFORCE THE NEED TO COLLABORATE

Culture can be an obstacle, but don't let it derail you or your team—and don't make it a scapegoat for other issues. If you begin to work with a new country, you have many options for gaining knowledge:

• Learn some words of the native language.

• Talk to colleagues who have already worked with this country. Or contact your local PMI chapter or other community of professionals to find people who have worked with this country. Their insights can help smooth the transition.

• Look into intercultural training. It can provide you with keys to decode others’ behaviors as well as prevent mistakes or faux pas on your part. This kind of training also helps you discover the areas where you can improve.

• Do your homework. Look into local holidays to avoid planning important milestones during an important religious festival or national celebration.

Continuous learning and adjustments, as well as an open mind and perseverance, will reward you in the long term when working with global teams. In fact, overcoming the obstacles and delivering global projects can be a source of personal enrichment and pride throughout your career.

STUDY THE CULTURE

Prioritizing projects and ensuring alignment to the company’s goals and objectives is a continuous effort for organizations. In order to deliver maximum value, project leaders can help prioritize projects. Here are six potential approaches to prioritizing projects.

Six Ways to Prioritize Projects

1. Scoring: Scoring is one of the significant methods used to prioritize projects. To score any project, a scoring profile is developed consisting of weighted categories and criteria. Categories are assigned a weight and values are assigned to the criteria. The project is scored by assessing each criterion and multiplying it by its weight. The total score for the project is based on the sum or average of all the weighted criteria scores.

2. MoSCoW Technique: This prioritization technique derives its name after the first letters of the following labels: Must have, Should have, Could have, and Wish to have. “Must have” requirements are mandatory and lay the foundation for any system. In the absence of these features, the system will not work or will have no value. “Should have” features are relatively important and should be present for the system to work correctly. “Could have” features are useful additions to the system that will add tangible value. “Wish to have/Won't have” requirements are nice-to-have features that are noted in the backlog and will be added to the scope after the must-have, should-have, and could-have requirements are addressed.

3. Dot Voting or Multivoting: In this technique, each stakeholder is given a predetermined number of dots to distribute among the options provided. Each stakeholder distributes the dots as desired based on the priority they envision. Stakeholders may distribute all the dots to one option or give no dots to one of the options displayed. The facilitator then sums up the votes for each option. The option that receives the most votes is considered the top priority, and the one with the least votes has the lowest priority. A good rule of thumb to determine the number of votes each stakeholder gets is to give them votes for 20% of the total number of features or requirements that are to be prioritized.by the organization to maximize benefits over the costs incurred by the organization.

4. 
   Requirements Prioritization Model: This is a mathematically driven model to calculate the priority of features. In this model, benefits, cost, penalties, and risk are rated on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest) against all the proposed features. Then the features are rated on the benefit of having versus not having the feature. Additionally, the team rates the cost and risk of producing the feature versus not producing it. The score for each attribute is then summarized in the weighted formula to calculate the relative priority of features or projects.

5. Return on Investment (ROI): ROI measures the profitability of an investment that can deliver fast and maximize the returns by quickly producing valuable deliverables in a given timeframe. A project that yields the highest ROI is very likely to be prioritized by the organization to maximize benefits over the costs incurred by the organization.

6. Minimal Viable Product (MVP) or Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF): This approach is mainly applicable to agile methodology, where features are decomposed in the smallest marketable packages that deliver significant business value within the chosen timeboxed period. Those features that deliver the highest customer value are considered critical and are given the highest priority to be implemented before less significant features.

This content was originally produced for Snippets. To learn more, please visit: https://snippets.pmi.org/

How to cite this article:

Khelifi, Y. (2020). Erasing Boundaries: When Projects Span the Globe, Here's How to Keep Everyone on the Same Page. PM Network, 34(3), 66–67.

Thank You...