Breaking bad news to stakeholders

Breaking bad news to stakeholders

by | 14 Jan 2017 | Consulting

8 steps to breaking bad news to difficult project stakeholders

There is no easy way to deliver bad news to anyone, especially difficult project stakeholders. Cushion the blow with clear open transparent PM communication.

Bad news is inevitable at some point during a project—the important thing to remember is don’t try to hide it, because that will only make things worse. Be transparent, be quick about it, and be part of the solution.

When you’re the bearer of bad news to the most difficult project stakeholders, follow these eight steps to make the process easier, to learn from what went wrong, and to develop mitigation strategies for future projects.

1: Identify the root cause

Before breaking bad news to stakeholders, dissect what went wrong. Trace problems back to the root cause, and remember this isn’t about blame. Projects are a team effort, and even if a team member makes a mistake, the result should be owned by the project team as a whole. Once the root cause(s) are identified, it’s an easier path to identify how issues could have been avoided.

This step may take a bit of time, but it is necessary. Stakeholders will ask “what happened?” so be prepared to answer this question.

2: Identify corrective action

Once the root cause and any breakdowns along the way have been identified, work with your team to determine possible ways to resolve any issues that can be fixed. If something can’t be resolved, make sure to identify the reason(s) and the impact to project outcomes.

3: Develop a plan for corrective action

Chart the process, the resources, and the timeline to correct problems at the source, and also identify and document any necessary scope changes. You need to make sure the plan is clear, accurate, and effective in directly resolving the problem, and ensure everyone is on the same page.

4: Communicate the bad news to stakeholders ASAP

Once the root cause of issues and a plan for corrective action have been identified, the difficult task of communicating bad news to stakeholders needs to take place as soon as possible. This isn’t a time to procrastinate; it can make things much worse, and sometimes even result in missing out on a pivotal event.

Having sufficient preparation and information can make the difference between a difficult stakeholder being understanding, or choosing to make life for everyone extremely miserable. Even a stakeholder with a hardened stance is more likely to try to work with project teams when mistakes are made if they have confidence in a project manager who shows they are proactive and part of the resolution. It’s smart to avoid just being the bearer of bad news.

5: Confirm commitment to corrective actions

Now that the news is out, reaffirm buy-in from stakeholders, especially as it relates to corrective actions. Moving ahead without this in place can exacerbate stakeholder frustration. Make sure to document everything from start to finish, including stakeholder discussions, proposed actions, accepted resolutions, and next steps.

6: Keep the communication flowing

Navigating through the previous steps isn’t the end of things by any stretch. To avoid additional concerns and problems, make sure all stakeholders and team members are kept well in the loop, especially relating to issues that prompted the bad news in the first place. Ongoing and transparent communication is one of the most critical steps when it comes to dealing with bad news, working with difficult stakeholders, and maintaining buy-in.

7: Identify lessons learned

Any time bad news surfaces as a result of things that have gone wrong, there’s always at least one lesson that can be learned. Regardless of where the trouble started, these lessons are not just for one individual—they’re useful for an entire team whether they’re impacted directly or not. Spend time with your team discussing these lessons at the time they occur, as well as the close-out of a project.

8: Develop future mitigation strategies

Once the project is complete and lessons learned have been discussed and documented, spend time developing mitigation strategies for future projects. This can save significant stress and strife between stakeholders in the future, and is well worth the effort.

“One of the most difficult things to tell stakeholders is that a project or part of the programme will be late to deliver. There are always valid reasons for delay, but properly managed and transparent openness is key to managing expectations”, states Craig Ashmole, Founding Partner of London based CCServe IT Interim consulting.

Some comments from Moira Alexander

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Is Interim Management Dead

Is Interim Management Dead

by | 11 Dec 2016 | Consulting, Outsourcing

Is the market changing the way that we engage and work with the use of Interim Management?

In short, the answer is no, Interim Consulting is not dead!

In fact, perhaps the question we should be asking instead is: “are we all interims now anyway?”

Permanent contracts are still dominant in businesses – and it is set to stay that way for the foreseeable future. But does a senior level “permanent” position really exist in this day and age? How beneficial could it be for us all to adopt an interim mind set – regardless of our actual position?

In an age of business disruption, where there are no certainties – as macro forces combine to place intense pressure on organisations across the spectrum – there is a necessity to be agile. Business leaders have to be prepared to change course at a moment’s notice and progress is often tracked project-by-project, rather than year-by-year.

To survive in this new environment and to create competitive advantage for our businesses, we may all find ourselves needing to take more of an interim approach to leadership.

Amid technological disruption and now Brexit, we are in the thick of a revolution in the business world. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be difficult to adjust to. Even the most gifted of business leaders can find themselves feeling slightly rootless as they face unprecedented changes within and outside their organisation.

So should we all be embracing an interim approach to work?

According to the Institute of Interim Management (IIM): “Interim managers bring well-qualified skills and expertise to bear at short notice, without the overheads and shackles associated with employment. They consult, plan, advise, implement, and embed the lessons, then exit, handling a range of key strategic and tactical interventions. As businesses in their own right, they offer independent expertise, free of company politics, and take responsibility for delivering results, not just offering advice.”

Without doubt, this is an approach that we can all learn from. With higher expectations of pace and impact, reliance on networking and an independent view – an individual working on an interim basis faces intense pressures. They have to make quick, but well-thought-through, decisions within a set timeframe, in order to bring about the desired outcomes. In many ways, this is leadership intensified.

Therefore, interims need to boast specific attributes and these differentiating “hallmarks” of professional interim managers and executives from other types of temporary or fixed-term contract resources are:

  • High-impact: interim managers are practiced at making a significant difference quickly, assessing and working with the company culture and often with little in the way of a formal “brief”. They do not need time to warm up or to settle in, but focus quickly on the work in hand.
  • Independent: they remain outside of company politics and so are able to address issues from a position of neutrality. This can be particularly useful when difficult and unpopular decisions have to be taken. They also act as trusted advisors who tell it as it is.
  • Professional: interim managers are micro-businesses in their own right, usually operating as limited companies. They trade with the hallmarks of business, not employment, such as professional indemnity insurance, business email and, often, their own business website.
  • Senior: operating at board or near-board level, interim managers are managers and executives, who have gravitas and credibility. They are used to leading businesses, functions, and departments. Suitably well qualified, they advise then deliver effective solutions.
  • Transformational: interim management is often focused on activities related to change, transition, business improvement, crisis management and turnaround. Even when their assignment addresses a gap or shortage, they add value and energise the workplace.
  • Wide expertise: with a strong track record of completing a variety of assignments, interim managers typically combine depth and breadth of expertise in their chosen sectors and disciplines. Their agility gives them the wide reaching expertise to deliver results quickly.
  • Time focused: interim managers are available at short notice. Once engaged, they will focus on providing significant value within the agreed fixed-term time parameters, seeing the assignment through and for not longer than needed, to a conclusion.

Source: Guide to interim management (IIM)

“As a relative newbie to some, around 6 years in interim engagement, I very much use the interim mind set in terms of thinking: What does the business need to achieve this quarter? How am I going to get impact on transformation? What are my quick wins? How am I going to get permanent employees to move things forward with me?” states Craig Ashmole, Founding Director of London based CCServe Interim Consulting.

So aren’t these attributes applicable for achieving competitive advantage for a business, regardless of our employment contract?

Teri Ellison from BIE explains: “The interim spell definitely honed my leadership skills faster than would have been the case in a permanent role. To suddenly lead a team of people who don’t look at you as a permanent employee or their manager and to have them follow you to build teams really challenges the way you lead.”

“At the same time, you’re learning to act as a genuine business partner to the client, helping them to think about where they’re growing their business, how they are driving their business and what impact you can have on their success.”
As disruption continues to make its presence felt, the ability to flex and adapt is crucial. What can we all do more of, regardless of our employment terms? Looking to the world of interims for inspiration could be just the tonic business leaders require.

So interim management is very much alive and well – in fact, it’s thriving. As the business world continues to turn on new axes, the skills and mind set of the interim manager can help leaders to adapt to new challenges and flourish. Whether your organisation hires an interim or simply employs their attributes within their working culture, business can all benefit from what the interim consultant brings to the table.

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Cloud Migration done right

Cloud Migration done right

by | 2 Nov 2016 | Cloud, Technology

Lessons on How Juniper Networks made the switch in the cloud and what you can learn

There are many steps for a company to transition to the cloud. At the 2016 Structure Conference, Juniper Networks’ CIO Bob Worrall explained how the company is managing the change.

For many companies, transitioning to the cloud is a long process with many steps. At the 2016 Structure Conference in San Francisco, Bob Worrall of Juniper Networks explained his company’s strategy and provided some best practices.

Over the past four years or so, Worrall said, Juniper has closed 17 of its 18 data centers, and moved 85% of its applications to the cloud. By June 2017, he said, the company won’t have any corporate data centers remaining. Almost all of their apps will be running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but their engineering assets will all be hosted on a private cloud, where they are adding their own tech and IP to make it a showcase for what they can do in networking, Worrall said.

One of the first considerations was the cost of moving to the cloud. On the engineering side, moving to the private cloud was a “no-brainer” in terms its financial impact, Worrall said. But, the transition away from their corporate data centers to the public cloud was a “fine line.”

Worrall said that Juniper, like many others, had to refactor their apps to run on the cloud, which was costly. So, he said, you have to pay attention to the cost model. Juniper designated some IT employees to look after monthly billing and bill statements to make sure they are continually optimizing for storage, and getting the most for their money.

For security, they created a team to think through security and compliance, and to make sure they’re meeting those needs. It took “grinding” to get the legal team comfortable with the cloud, Worrall said. But, they’re also investing heavily in network monitoring, logging, and inspection so they can more readily detect and respond to any issues.

The cloud has “retooled” the Juniper organization, Worrall said. Juniper has made significant investments in the skillsets needed for designing apps for the cloud, and refactoring them to run in the cloud. According to Worrall, the firm has bifurcated its development team to focus on those issues and they have added new employees who understand the cloud environments of Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM.

The most critical skills, he said, are found among the people who know how to make these cloud platforms work together. So, they’ve hired more people in the US and India to look after that connection, and they use Oracle Fusion Middleware to connect all the clouds together.

Juniper’s vendor management team has also been strengthened to better look after SaaS contracts and vendor promises, to make sure their cloud investments are optimized.

While there has been a lot of positive reaction from employees, Worrall said, some people have left the company over time. As a response, Juniper is investing in existing employees to help them grow their skills. Companies should consider the impact that cloud will have on their workforce.

Craig Ashmole, Founding Director of London based CCServe stated, “There are commercial businesses that are taking advantage of the strategic moves that Juniper Networks have taken. This businesses can deploy green field Data centre sites in under a few weeks. This is real value.”

Picture above: Juniper Networks CIO, Bob Worrall, speaking with ZDNet's Stephanie Condon at Structure.
Image: Jason Hiner/TechRepublic

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Is contracting the future

Is contracting the future

by | 14 Oct 2016 | Consulting

Is tech turning contract work into the future of employment?

Technology has made it easier than ever for employees to work remotely. This article has gathered comments from experts and CEOs about why more and more companies are using contract workers.

Technology has made working remotely easier than ever. And many companies are taking advantage of this — not just by having workers telecommute, but by outsourcing certain jobs to contract workers. The movement towards contract work — think platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, ClickWorkers, CrowdFlower — is part of a larger trend away from regular employment and towards piecing together tasks.

Gartner analyst Diane Morello has been working with companies for years to help them keep up with workforce trends. The movement towards contract work “reminds me of when my immigrant grandparents came to work in New York City and did piece work,” she said.

While the technology is certainly there, she thinks that the success of piecework hinges on the “basics of organisational and institutional competence.”

“It’s about whether or not companies can make this work,” said Morello. “That’s the bigger challenge out there.”
Morello thinks that companies need to catch up with the idea that they need to outsource work. She speaks to 10-12,000 companies around the world, employing about 250,000 people. Among all those companies, she sees “a very small fraction understanding that they can start to break down work into increasingly smaller components and break it apart to some kind of massively parallel processing mode,” she said. “They can have bits and pieces done and then reassemble that onsite.”

There is a trend rapidly moving towards the selling off and outsourcing of utility services.

Most companies she talks to still think of this as outsourcing. “They’re not really advancing their models and thinking around how work is getting done, or more important how technology in this digital technology platform enables them to reach hundreds of people to get work done in smaller chunks in a faster way,” stated Craig Ashmole, founding Director of London based IT Consulting CCServe. “Having spent many years working across the Outsource market and more recently helping business transition elements of their business into better chunks of doing the work, It’s refreshing to see these trends start to move.”

The big difference, is that it’s a shift towards work as a transaction versus a relationship. Not only do business want work done in small pieces, but I see “a consuming audience who wants to do that. Businesses are going back to their core roots by commoditising non-essential utility services.”

“The businesses we talk to who are struggling to find the right talent and the right people say they want the relationship,” he said. “But when you delve into it, what they’re looking for are people who can bring their skills to deliver rapid transition and this comes from experienced Interim management.”

Business owners agree.

“I absolutely see larger companies outsourcing things that are non-core,” said David Chang, entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School, and previous co-founder of SnapMyLife.

Chang used Trip Advisor as an example, where “the sheer volume of work” created a huge demand for contract work. “At TripAdvisor, we had classifiers who helped with that,” said Chang.

He also sees a distinction between core and non-core functions as important. In core tasks, “the company wants to build up a competency or muscle around a key area,” said Chang. “For Apple, hardware/software is core, so they don’t outsource it,” he said, “while at Microsoft, they happily let others deal with hardware (e.g. Dell, HP).”

It’s all part of meeting a huge demand to complete tasks.

“There are thousands and thousands of companies that are all feverishly looking around for people to do work in the context of information and technology and web design and the like,” said Morello. “This is a channel to get some work done.”

Businesses, Morello believes, will “splinter into two different directions. One will be those businesses that have extraordinary cultures, core sets of values, and taken advantage of all the aspects and ways that they can piece together someone’s expertise in the work,” she said.

The other group “will continue to work with a single pipeline that tends to go through HR. It’s probably not going to operate at the speed that the modern business community is operating at.”

Digital technology, she said, will “blow the employment model apart. It will send people in one direction where there are a lot of users of digital technology to find the expertise they need anywhere on the planet.”

There’s a risk, Morello said, for not taking this seriously.
“You are either leaders or you are laggers,” she said. “Nobody can be in the middle.”

The 4 big takeaways

  1. Platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower, and ClickWorkers take advantage of a remote labour force to get tasks completed.
  2. Outsourcing small tasks is part of a bigger trend that shifts business models from “relationship” to “transaction,” according to Gartner analyst.
  3. Separating core and non-core work is essential to managing flow of work—and many companies are becoming more efficient by farming out non-core tasks.
  4. Business conglomerates are transitioning their utility services to Outsource firms (for efficiency and cost reductions) and keeping their core business in-house.

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Global Employers choose consultants

Global Employers choose consultants

by | 3 Sep 2016 | Consulting

Over 70% of global employers now use contractors to help fill IT skills shortages

A new report found that 40% of US businesses now have a hybrid workforce of permanent and contract IT employees to fill talent shortages and fast-changing technical skill needs.

If you’re running a company in the US, there’s a good chance your next IT hire will not be a permanent member of the team. A new report from Experis found that 40% of US companies now have a hybrid workforce of permanent, freelance, and contract employees — the highest percentage of hybrid workers globally.

Hiring IT contractors has become more popular worldwide, with 71% of employers across ten countries currently using contract talent — likely due in part to increased shortages in skilled IT workers. In the US, just 41% of companies rely solely on permanent IT staff.

“Faced with talent shortages and fast-changing skills needs, companies are getting more sophisticated when it comes to workforce solutions, particularly in IT,” said Sean Costello, senior vice president of Experis, North America. “Having been through the cost-cutting of the recession, many are now re-evaluating and reengineering their workforce.”

Rather than sticking with business-as-usual, companies are recognising the need for more customised sourcing strategies, Costello said. Contractors can offer more efficiency and flexibility for companies working on tight deadline projects and innovative new ideas that require technical skills that are not found in-house, he added.

Companies in each of the 10 nations surveyed varied greatly in in-country IT hiring practices. Not surprising the countries with the highest numbers of permanent employees were:-

  • Germany (63% permanent)
  • India (62% permanent)
  • Australia (58% permanent)

When it comes to hiring IT talent overseas, employers preferred using a mix of contractors, freelancers, and permanent workers, more so than at home, the report found. Companies don’t usually have the same level of legacy infrastructure overseas as in their home market, Costello said. Many find that working with contractors or buying staffing solutions through partnership arrangements offers a fast, efficient way to ramp-up operations overseas.

Hiring contractors

One in 5 US employers plans to increase their use of IT contractors, the report found.

“Having been in the Interim contracting space for a number of years I see how the contractor model appeals to many people, particularly in the IT space,” states Craig Ashmole, founding Director of London based consulting CCServe. “They are looking for greater flexibility and variety in the work they do. These IT roles tend to attract self-motivated individuals who prioritise on-going skills development and like to see rapid results delivered.”

Companies hired contractors most often for development solutions and infrastructure service, the report found — two areas in which the technical requirements shift rapidly and require the most up-to-date skills. If a legacy workforce falls behind the curve, organisations often look to contractors to bring the added technical know-how to get the job done.

Contract work is appealing to companies because of its flexibility, the report found. “With tighter margins and tougher competition, all organisations are looking for ways to be nimbler and shift more easily as markets change,” Costello said. “Contract work offers the ability to quickly ramp-up and test-drive projects without the same level of risk. It is tailor-made for innovation in this period when companies are still a little cautious after the recession.”

These workers can also be more cost-effective: When a project has a fixed timeframe, it is often easier to find contractors that can fill an immediate need, rather than finding and training a permanent employee. Contractors can also be a way to tap underused talent, including minorities, women, and older workers, Costello said.

By implementing a diverse workforce strategy, blending permanent and contingent workers, companies are finding ways to be both more agile and cost-competitive, It’s a new way of thinking about workforce management.

The 3 big takeaways

  1. Use of contract workers is increasing worldwide, with 71% of employers across ten countries currently using contract talent, according to a new report on IT workforce trends from Experis.
  2. Contractors can offer more efficiency and flexibility for companies working on tight-deadline projects and innovative new ideas that require advanced technical skills.
  3. Some 40% of US businesses now feature a hybrid workforce of permanent, contract, and freelance employees, representing the largest such workforce globally.

Companies hired contractors most often for development solutions and infrastructure service, a report from Experis has found — two areas in which the technical requirements shift rapidly and require the most up-to-date skills. If a legacy workforce falls behind the curve, organisations often look to contractors to bring the added technical know-how to get the job done.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe