As a top project manager you should be able to articulate the progress of your project clearly, concisely and confidently. Having excellent verbal communication skills is key if you want to be a great project manager. You can communicate far more with voice than you can with written words, especially if you are communicating face to face. Like it or not, your competence will be judged by how well you speak.
A major part of the role is updating stakeholders on many aspects of the project. A typical format for a project update is the ‘project status report’. This is a high-level summary of the RAG status of your project (i.e. Red/Amber/Green) and how you are going to resolve any key issues.
There are many scenarios where you would have to provide a status update. For example, during your project working group, during the programme update call (where your project could be one workstream which is part of a larger programme) or even during an update to your own department. The more senior the audience, the more polished your update should be. With time and experience, your updates should naturally get better. However, if you are new to the role then you should invest some of your energy and time proactively improving your updates.
Why should you do this? I’ve already said that your competence will be judged on your ability to speak well. So, giving a verbal project update is a perfect opportunity to let people, from all over the organisation, know that you are a competent project manager. This is your high leverage opportunity to, in a short 10 minutes, make an impression on many people. It’s your opportunity to build a reputation for yourself. It’s an opportunity to shine amongst your peers. It’s an opportunity to be noticed. It’s up to you to make the most of this opportunity. You could make a bad impression (where everyone will remember you for the wrong reasons), you could make a mediocre impression (where no one will remember you at all), or you can make a great impression where everyone will remember you for the right reasons.
Making a bad impression is quite easy. If you want to make a bad impression, here is a five-point checklist –
- Be unprepared. Don’t make any effort to think about what you are going to say ahead of the update
- Be vague. If possible, make it sound like you really don’t know what the hell is going on in your own project
- Sound nervous and hesitant. Speak quietly and mumble at the key moments. Ensure your eyes are constantly darting around and looking down regularly. Say ‘um’ as often as you can for good measure
- Bullshit when you don’t know the answer to a question. Avoid saying ‘I don’t know’ at all costs. Instead, continue to lie and dig yourself a bigger hole
- Have no idea what the next steps in your project are. It’s critical that you don’t have a path to green and your words, tone and body language should convey that you haven’t thought about it all
Alternately, if you want to make a great impression, follow this checklist –
- Be prepared. Know the saliant points to include in your update. Have them bulleted in your notes ready to refer to if needed
- Be specific in your updates. Give specific dates and names. Provide detail where appropriate. Speak in facts, not beliefs or assumptions
- Sound confident and in control. Speak clearly and articulately. Be loud enough to be heard. Speak in measured tones and take your time. Keep your ‘ums’ to the minimum
- Be honest if you don’t know the answer to a question. If you don’t know the answer, say ‘to be honest I’m not sure, but I will find out and let you know today (E.g ‘Jenny – can you note that down as an action for me?’)
- Have a clear path to green. If your project is amber or red, be ready with all the key steps that need to happen to get your project back to green, with a target completion date for each one
In summary, if you want to give a good update you need to be confident, knowledgeable and articulate. Articulated speech is incredibly important. I will never forget a talk from Jordon Peterson about articulated speech, ever since I heard it, I have thought about it in a different way –
‘There is nothing more powerful than someone who is articulate and can think and speak. It’s POWER, and I mean power of the best sort. It’s authority and influence and respectability and competence’
As I said earlier, you will get better and better at updates with experience. However, when you are first starting out, it can be quite nerve wracking. I’ll tell you about my own journey with this process. When I first got promoted to a lead project manager position, I moved to a different department in a different office in a different city. The city was called Bristol (in the UK) and the office had about 3000 staff. I only knew one of them. I had to leave the comfort zone of my old department where I had a good reputation, and start again completely from scratch. I was given a challenging project with a budget of around 2 million pounds as a means of induction.
I was expected to give many verbal stakeholder updates in a variety of settings, and a lot of the time the audience was quite senior. The most common of these updates was the LRM (Legal, Regulatory, Mandatory) Portfolio update meeting where all the project managers would report on their respective projects. In attendance were a variety of stakeholders, including sponsors and heads of functions. Sometimes these meeting were held face to face and sometimes by teleconference.
Right from the start, I was very keen to ensure I came across well to all my peers and stakeholders. This wasn’t easy because the prospect of speaking in front of all these people I didn’t know, despite being quite experienced at presentations, was fairly scary. It wasn’t scary in the sense I would lose sleep, but scary enough to get my heart beating fast with a pit in my stomach a few minutes before I gave the update.
As such, I always came prepared. In the case of the face-to-face meetings, I would jot down the key things I was going to say, and often I would find an empty meeting room and actually practice first. When it came to the real meeting, I would have the key bullets written down in front of me so I could glance at them if needed. In the case of the teleconference updates, I would script the key body of the update, or at least the introduction. I would then have it open on my screen during my update and read it verbatim. I loved doing this, because I could really take my time, speaking in measured tones, pausing now and then for effect, without needing to say umm. This might sound like ‘cheating’ but I really believe in the phrase ‘fake it until you make it’. After I did that for about a year, the need to practice and read scripts faded away and I was able to do it from the top of my head. However, that early ‘crutch’ absolutely gave me confidence and did a lot of good for my reputation.
In summary, providing a verbal update to a group of stakeholders is your golden opportunity to shine. Speak with confidence and be articulate. The best way to learn to do this is through preparation and practice. This is a high leverage opportunity where a little investment of time and energy can go a long way.
Project Manaverse 