Change consultant and executive coach Nicola Hopes shares several tips and tricks for crafting intentional business projects that can facilitate meaningful changes for organisations.
Hopes explains the fundamental questions that help ensure projects achieve intended outcomes, the importance of knowing what good looks like throughout the process, and how leaders can better balance project demands alongside their day-to-day responsibilities.
“I’ve seen lots of organisations passionate about doing a great project,” Hopes said. “And, at the end of it, what’s delivered doesn’t quite solve the problem they were trying to solve, or it doesn’t quite realise the opportunity, because they just weren’t clear enough about what good looks like. Unless you’ve painted that picture really clearly, you don’t know how to navigate the problems as you go through.”
Resource: Nicola Hopes’ UK & Ireland ENGAGE slides.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- Crucial areas to understand before taking on a business project.
- How to improve your approach when pitching initiatives to stakeholders.
- Digital tools that can help organise key information.
- Strategies for improving interpersonal skills.
- How leaders can help stakeholders find common ground during disagreements.
- Three ways leaders can save time and resources on projects.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: Welcome back to FM, listeners. I’m Steph Brown. On this episode, I’m joined by another speaker at UK & Ireland ENGAGE, Nicola Hopes. We’re recording live from the event. For today’s topic, which is all about the ins and outs of business projects, Nicola will be sharing tips and strategies for optimising professionals’ approach to planning and delivering complex projects that bring results for their organisations.
Nicola is a consultant and executive coach who helps to guide corporations through a variety of changes and transformations to the ways companies can do business. We’ll be looking at best practices for pitching projects and initiatives, what tools and resources can help professionals on this journey, and how leaders can manage the responsibilities of large projects alongside their day-to-day responsibilities.
Thanks for coming on the FM podcast, Nicola. Welcome.
Nicola Hopes: You’re very welcome. Lovely to be here, Steph. Thank you.
Brown: For clients and companies you have worked with that are looking to make big changes to the way they do business, I imagine there’s usually a great deal of determination and ambition that comes along with that mindset of being more open to change. But if we’re getting into the finer details, what do professionals and leaders need to really understand before taking on a project like that?
Hopes: It’s a great question, and you’d be amazed how many people get this wrong in projects, actually. I would always say, get clear on what good looks like from the start. It sounds trite, but it’s such a fundamental mistake. So many projects I’ve been asked to do a health check on, I’ve come and spoken to the first three stakeholders and asked them, what’s the point of this? What will we be able to do differently? Why are we bothering with this? And I get three different answers. Because we’re not clear enough on why we’re doing that particular project.
For me, unless you’ve got clear on that North Star, what you’re aiming for, you’ve got no way when budgets get squeezed, which they inevitably will, when you hit issues, which you inevitably will. The decisions that you make should all go back to: Why are we doing this? What’s the purpose? What does good look like at the end of it? Unless you’ve painted that picture really clearly, you don’t know how to navigate the problems as you go through.
If you’re part way into something and you feel that perhaps you’ve not made those calls yet, step back and make them. Because they will save you a lot of time and money down the road in poor decisions. I’ve seen lots of organisations passionate about doing a great project. And, at the end of it, what’s delivered doesn’t quite solve the problem they were trying to solve, or it doesn’t quite realise the opportunity, because they just weren’t clear enough about what good looks like. That very simple, very straightforward answer. But so many organisations get that bit wrong.
Brown: Let’s say you have a client struggling to get their initial pitch off the ground in their meetings with executives. Maybe the monetary reward is not always apparent or going to come quick enough. What advice would you give to help them sell their ideas better?
Hopes: It’s a great question, and it comes up time and time again because people have got great ideas. But unless you’re a really skilled communicator, sometimes you can’t get those ideas across. I would always think about: Who’s your audience? Who are those stakeholders that you need to get across the line? Whether that’s budget approval. Whether that’s approval for the resources. What’s in it for them? What do they worry about? What keeps them awake at night? What would excite them?
Then think about that as the angle for the pitch. It’s OK to have a different set of messages — one stakeholder to another — based on the things they’re going to care about, as long as you’re still true to what you’re trying to do with that project. Of course, there are going to be different angles to it. If you don’t feel, when you’ve had a chance to think that through, how can I influence these people? If it’s not clear to you what the selling points are that might cover what each of the stakeholders think about or care about, you might be solving the wrong problem or going at the wrong opportunity.
Go back and regroup, but don’t give up. Because no project or initiative you admire got the go ahead in five minutes. Anything that’s big takes time to get right. If you’re not quite right yet, if those messages aren’t right, it goes back to that North Star point. If that isn’t clear, go back and think about it. But don’t give up. Because to deliver the right project, to solve the right problem, or get the right opportunity over the line, there will be a way to do it. It’ll just be a case of finding it.
But what do they care about? What’s going to keep them up at night? That’s the angle you go at them with.
Brown: I think that’s a really positive way to look at it. The idea is not necessarily bad. The process might not be completely correct, or the approach might not be the best.
Hopes: Absolutely.
Don’t be afraid to be creative. Don’t be afraid to think about things in different ways. Don’t think you’ve got to solve it all yourself. Because, even if you’ve come up with an idea, pitching that might not be a great skill set of yours.
Talking to colleagues might be a great way of road-testing some of those ideas before they even get in front of the stakeholders, and getting more input from your peers and colleagues. It doesn’t have to be all your unique thinking. If you’re bringing all of that together, it’s still you making it happen.
Brown: That’s great advice.
Someone might be listening to this thinking, “Well, that applies to me. I’m trying to really promote this idea, this solution, and it’s not getting many ears just now.” They might think, “Actually, maybe my communication’s not the best. Maybe I’m looking at it a little bit wrong.”
For those people, what tools and resources are key for both planning and communicating the aims and objectives throughout the various stages of a business project?
Hopes: It’s a great question. Lots of organisations I work with use different tools, and I think in summary, it depends on the culture of your organisation. There are some organisations that will always want some of those things to be face-to-face for the key discussions. There are some organisations now using channels like Slack for a lot of their communication. It sort of depends on the size of your organisation and the culture of it.
But in terms of the core tools that I’ve seen work, Microsoft Teams Planner is great because most people already have it in their Teams toolkit. For finance professionals out there, they’ll like it because it’s free. But what it does, it can link plans, tasks, and daily activities together quite simply and in quite a good user interface. Actually, you can plan things together, you can allocate tools together, you can collaborate better. But what I would say is, that’s a great tool for working within a project. It’s not necessarily a good tool for talking to stakeholders. I think lots of stakeholder conversations are still conversations, because they’re not going to want to get into the detail of the tools that you’re using.
Other tools like Trello are really good for things like content-based projects. When you’re creating content together, lots of people use Trello to collaborate on things like that. A really old tool like Asana can be really good. Although it’s been around for a while, it integrates with lots of other tools that have lots of AI capability. It has lots of what we call power-ups, which is basically using tools and features from other AI applications, and it integrates with them seamlessly. Lots of people use it for quite complex projects where you’ve got lots of stages, phases, lots of stakeholders to keep in the loop. That’s quite a good one.
There’s a PDF toolkit that I’ve produced for this talk specifically on great projects and how to make them successful. There’s more information on some of those different tools within that and links to go and explore more. But my overall message is, based on what tool might be right for the culture of your organisation and your project: Just give it a go. Lots of people get scared of doing those things because they don’t know what they’re doing. But if you think about when everyone started using videoconferencing technology, which now feels so passé, when we first started using that, it was all a bit new to us.
Pick a tool. Play with it. Pilot it within the team. See how well it goes. Make some tweaks and changes. If it doesn’t work first time, don’t worry, persist. If that isn’t the right tool, see if there’s another tool out there that might be right for you. But there are lots of tools out there that will save you time and money within the project team to actually get that stuff, to collaborate on the plans, to collaborate on the tasks together in a much more intuitive way than what we may have been using in the past — old-school spreadsheets, emails to send things to each other.
There’s much more sophisticated ways of doing that, much better user interfaces. But have a bit of a play. See what suits you and your project, and then run with it. But don’t be scared.
Brown: I think as well, professionals can relate to having things just scattered about the place. Whether it’s, “I need to get this information, it’s in this email. I need to go back and find that. This is in this document.” It’s difficult. It’s good that you mentioned that there are these tools, these digital communication tools, that can help link all these resources together, so you know everything’s in one place.
Hopes: Exactly right.
Brown: Utilising these tools, as you said, is quite imperative for driving success in these projects and initiatives now.
But you also mentioned, of course, that there’s that culture where we still need to sometimes have these face-to-face meetings. On that, what interpersonal skills are really necessary for leading these big, often complex projects, in your opinion?
Hopes: It’s been a bit of a theme. I’ve heard it several times through today, storytelling as a skill for finance professionals. And that is really important because actually, in getting complex projects, in getting change off the ground, you have to be able to tell people stories about what you’ll be able to do after that project is delivered and why it’s so important.
There’s a great tool about using “a day in the life” story — which is one of the tools I use — to actually put people in that future that they might be in about what they’re going to be able to do at the end of it, which drives the passion. Again, you’ve not got to be a showperson to do this, but just developing some of those storytelling tools to influence hearts and minds, I think can really make a difference in terms of interpersonal skills.
I think listening skills are also really important. I think when you’re talking to clients and customers about what they might think about what you’re trying to do. Or you’re talking to users in your organisation who are going to be changing their processes, using that new technology. Whatever it is that you’re trying to put in place — using those new policies, perhaps — speaking to them about what they want and really hearing their answers is really important, and hearing what issues they might have so you can overcome them is really critical.
The storytelling outward communication and I think the listening inward communication is really key. People go with things that they’re passionate about. I think at the end of the day, if you’ve communicated that passion and if you’ve listened to other people’s passion, that ends up being some of the reasons some projects get done and some don’t.
Then I think lastly, for me, it’s about collaboration. One of [the] breakouts this morning was about high performing teams, and it’s so important if you’re involved in a project. How do you manage and motivate? Whether they’re peers of yours, or whether you’re actually leading the team — it doesn’t matter either way. Because again, lots of projects happen because they have great teams working together to the same outcome.
Brown: When we think of problems or things that just aren’t working as well as they could, it might not be necessarily affecting just one team or one department. When it’s organisation-wide, and you have different teams across departments that have the same goal in mind, but they have very different methods in mind of achieving those goals. How can leadership confront those disagreements in a way that encourages collaboration?
Hopes: Again, it’s a really great question. And sometimes working on projects feels a bit like marriage guidance. Sometimes it feels like you’re trying to bring people together. If you are super clear on those goals, and I think you’ve said in the question, we’re clear on the goals, but we’re just not clear on how to get there. Then, I think bringing the stakeholders together to really understand what are the points of agreement and what are the points where you’ve got differences. Because it’s really easy when you’re in a position where there’s two or three stakeholders that have different views, to think they’re on completely different pages. They might not be.
It might be they agree on three points, and they disagree on one of them. Let’s really lean into the three that they agree on and make it really clear that we’re all in agreement to those elements of the solution. This is the one we’ve not got agreement on, “How are we going to fix it together?” I don’t think it’s necessarily about one team convincing the other team that their answer is right. I think it’s about bringing them together to find a solution they can all believe in. Ideally in that, there’s elements where everybody gets to win, and that’s another skill you’re bringing out, your problem-solving skills.
If you can find a way where all of those stakeholders can get an element of their win, but we’ve got something we can all buy into, we’re going to move forward. Occasionally, it works when everyone comes all the way over to someone else’s opinion. But I think sometimes you get fallout further down the line. Try and find common ways of moving forward, so when you hit the next bump in the road, we’re not all falling out again over the same issues.
Brown: That’s a great note.
Obviously, these projects can be very consuming, all-consuming at some points. As you said, these big projects, it’s always a slow work in progress. What are two or three tips you’d suggest for leaders that are struggling to balance their day-to-day workloads alongside these big projects that are obviously taking up a lot of time as well?
Hopes: Absolutely. If I had a pound for every time I was asked something similar, I’d be a very rich woman. This comes up time and time again because people are being asked to do this on top of their day jobs, as you say. And it’s becoming more and more prevalent that people are involved in lots of different projects all at once. It’s not even one big project now. It’s a number of different things. Three tips from me on getting this to work in your diary: The first is manage down meetings. It is the biggest time sucker on projects, and it is a total waste of time.
There’s a few areas that I’d like to focus in on this. A number of you may have heard me say this already today: Don’t drag people in a room to hear updates. You can share updates via any channel of communication. I’ve seen so many projects go wrong where there’s a two-hour meeting where we’re just hearing what everyone else has been up to, and as nice as that is, that’s two hours we’re not getting back in our diaries again. Focus your meetings on your decisions, and your updates can be done virtually. You can create a team folder. You can create channels for chat where you can share those things with each other far more dynamically.
When I said before, engage users. People think, “What? We’ve got to invite everyone who’s a user into a room all at the same time for a workshop?” No, you don’t. You can create an engaging group with them and do chat to answer some questions. You can give them proactive updates in real time on certain things without pulling them into meetings to do it. Actually, if you’ve got a communications team in your organisation, use them to help. But the more engaging you can be about some of those groups and how you facilitate them, it reduces the number of formal meetings you’ve got to have, which really improves the meeting times.
In terms of governance, I think that causes a lot of issues with meetings when people aren’t clear on who can make what call. I’ve got ten stakeholders in a room because I’m not sure who’s the person that can really decide. If it’s the CFO [that] can decide, I’m going to go and talk to them directly, and maybe everyone else just needs to understand they’ve got the power to authorise that, and therefore, we’re not pulling all those people into a room.
A few ways in which you can manage down meetings, but they are a real time sucker on projects. I think the second one is linked, but it’s slightly different, which is cut the bureaucracy. I’ve seen lots of organisations that have gone quite over the top in their frameworks. They’re filling in lots of forms, and there’s lots of gates to go through and lots of discussions to have. Actually, simplify. Don’t have people filling in similar forms for different things; reduce the number of templates.
Of course, you’ve got to answer certain questions. You’ve got to make sure funding’s approved. There are certain things you’ve got to do. But you can do it in a really slick way or you can do it in a really convoluted way. I think lots of organisations confuse bureaucracy with governance. They think the only way to do it is to make it hard and difficult. And actually, you can still control it well and make it simple and make it slick.
Then the last thing is, there’s a bit of trust in projects. I always say, and one of the stakeholders that I work with is actually a chair of an organisation that I do consulting and coaching with. His phrase is: “Only do what only you can do.” The day that Martin said that was the day I went, “That’s absolutely it.” When you’re working in project teams, let the other experts be expert. Let the finance experts be the expert, let the technical experts be the expert. Actually, you’re not having to be involved in every single conversation. You’re not having to double-check other people’s work.
You’re not having to look over certain solutions or elements of it. They’re the expert in that; I trust them. These are the things that I need to do, which means your to-do-list gets a lot narrower, and again, it gets a lot more manageable. Think about ways to cut down your meetings, clarify your governance and decision-making, so everybody doesn’t think they have to weigh in on everything. Only do what only you can do, and let the other experts get on with the bits that they need to get on with. Those are three ways you can balance the time that the projects will take versus what else you’re doing in your day job.
Brown: Thanks, Nicola. Thank you for providing all these recommendations people can listen to and ponder over and see what suits their needs. Thanks so much.
In closing, do you have any words you’d like to leave anyone tuning in that is ambitious about the project that they’re doing, but they’re worried that it’s going slightly off-track?
Hopes: Listen to your instincts. I think if you think it might be going off-track, it probably is because your instinct is the sum total of all of your experience.
Be prepared to step back. Be prepared to ask some questions. Again, in the PDF download, the toolkit that I’ve produced for today, there’s some key questions that I’ve set out you can ask yourself at any phase of a project. If you can’t answer those questions: Something’s going wrong. So, they’re a good anchor point.
But if you believe it might be going off-track: Stop. Take a step back. Talk to the team. Talk to the stakeholders. Try and identify what you think the problem is. Is it a question you haven’t answered that you’re not clear enough on? In which case, if you have to take two steps back to do it, it’s worth it. Because again, it will save you time in the future.
Trust your instincts, just try and get to the root of the problem quickly.
Brown: We’ll link [to] those resources in the show notes that you’ve mentioned. Thanks again for coming on the podcast.
Hopes: Thanks so much, Steph.
