Revenue Journal®

Your brand is the promise that you keep, not the one you make. This is my take on branding, which I first wrote in 1994 to help CEOs and entrepreneurs understand that they have direct control over their brand, using the five promise-keeping tools at their disposal: people, products, policies, projects, and processes.

When I work with CEOs and entrepreneurs, I find that their products are usually competitive. Their people are usually intelligent, hard-working, and well-intentioned. Their policies are usually OK - assuming the head of the company is not a jerk.

Given that most companies have decent products, people and policies, that leaves the other two resources: projects and processes. Many companies choose the wrong projects or manage them poorly. Even more companies have weak, dysfunctional, or even abysmal processes.

This week we'll look at projects, next week we'll cover processes.

Project Management: Critical success element

If you spend a lot of time in meetings arguing, you have a project management problem. When a project is being managed properly, discussion is focused and fairly limited. Things get done.

Here is what successful project management looks like. A lot of this is common sense, but you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) how often one or more of these ingredients are missing.

1) There is always a leader. Someone is in charge, and everyone knows it, including those below and those abovethe person, as well as those in other areas of the company (or outside the company) who will be involved in the project. If there is any doubt about who is in charge, the project will either fail or limp along - and a project that limps along is still failing, only slowly.

The main responsibilities of the leader are: organizing the project, running the meetings associated with the project, tracking the project's progress, communicating to everyone about the project, motivating and disciplining participants, providing resources, and removing barriers that crop up as the project is underway. The project should begin with an email or other simple document that outlines the essential facts about the project: Who, what, why, when, and how.

2) There is a clearly stated goal, and a timeline for achieving that goal. Everyone has to know what the goal is. The goal has to be clear - and measurable. Something has to be done, something has to change, something has to be substantially different than it was before. And, everyone must know how long it should take for the goal to be reached. This is a key metric. If the timeline starts to slip, the project leader needs to kick into high gear and relentlessly drill down with the participants until the bottleneck is found and eliminated.

3) There must be milestones. If it's a really simple project, the only milestone will be the end goal. If it is a complex project, there will be a number of milestones along the way. Everyone must know what they are and everyone must be held to them.

4) Email subject lines must be consistent. The main communication vehicle for projects is email. Subject lines are critical. Don't say, "A concern" in the subject line or, "Files you requested." Say, "Intranet redesign project: Current status." Always use the same beginning ("Intranet redesign project") so everyone can sort incoming emails by subject line and all the files associated with that project will be grouped together.

5) State the obvious, clearly and succinctly, so everyone understands what is happening, when, how, and why. Imagine that the project is "Write a review about the movie we just saw."

An ineffective project manager will send out an email with the subject line, "Meeting on Tuesday." The email will say something vague, such as "Need to have a discussion about a review. Meeting should only last a half hour." This "project manager" will start out the first meeting with a long rant about how much she enjoyed the movie, how she felt about the actors in the movie, why she went to the movie, what her husband thought about the movie, how this movie compared to other movies she's seen. Sometime in the middle of this meaningless diatribe, she will mention that the assignment is for everyone to write a review about the movie. She will have provided no context for her ramblings, will not have told the participants what was expected of them, and her conversation would be all about herself. This unhelpful and insulting "method" is used by far too many "managers."

An effective project manager will send an email to all movie-goers prior to the movie. "Review about movie: Meeting on Tuesday, your review due by Friday." The email will contain the pertinent facts: Who will be writing the reviews (and reading them), why the reviews are being done, when the reviews are due, and suggestions on how participants should go about writing the review. Note how the subject line not only mentioned the subject but what was expected of the participants, and when.

6) Keep on track. No one has time for discussions that get seriously off track. It is the responsibility of the project manager to make sure that all discussions stay on subject. If they start to wander, she must interrupt. "I'm sorry, we need to save that particular discussion for another meeting. Let's get back to [whatever they should be talking about].

7) Remove all barriers, aggressively. When a barrier to progress is found, it must be understood and then removed. This is the leader's responsibility. She must do whatever is necessary to remove the barrier.

8) Publicize success. The leader must also publicize the project's success, as it moves along and/or as it is completed. Others in the company must understand why the project was undertaken, the goal of the project, how it was completed and who worked on it. The results of the project, including lessons learned and any subsequent positive results, should be documented and presented.

Every business is just a series of projects undertaken and completed, whether you run a one-person company or a company with 300,000 people. If your projects are successful, your company will be successful - assuming you also have some process management in place. We'll cover that next week.