Isn't this the time of year when major projects are planned? For example, if you're designing a new pay or sales compensation program. These projects take three or more months to complete and involve large, diverse project teams.
Like every project, you will start with the end in mind, providing an overview of the deliverables, implementation scope and outcomes to be achieved. While this first step takes a bit of time, describing target problems and outlining solutions is usually the easy part of project planning. After all, these are the issues you've been worrying about. Plus, you've had to pitch the project, so you will probably already have much of this work in your back pocket.
The next step of writing a project plan takes a different set of skills and focus. You need to understand the work process well enough to break it into steps and identify the staff, time and other resources you need. This demands a strategic view, but the key strategic decisions actually come when you select the points in the workflow which signify that a major event in your progress has occurred. Selecting these milestones involves judgment, since you're choosing multiple points when your team will be willing to measure progress and talk about it outside the project.
Milestones are useful for monitoring and controlling the project work but it's important to realize that their role is bigger. Because they act as signposts, they are visible both to your project team and to management. And with bigger budget projects, they can signal the points where go/no go decisions will be made about your funding.
On that point, don't kid yourself. Upfront approval of your project doesn't guarantee unwavering support throughout. Projects can and will be stopped by your project sponsors or senior management when milestones are ignored or signal poor clarity of purpose. I've seen it happen.
Many milestones involve an update meeting with your sponsors or senior management. But even if you don't have a milestone presentation scheduled, realize that there are ongoing discussions at upper levels about how the team is progressing -- these happen with or without your team's knowledge. To keep your communications crisp and meaningful, design a dashboard that you (and your sponsor) can use to visualize progress. Most reviewers prefer data presented graphically, so visuals like dashboards send powerful messages about your project management achievements.
Also, at the beginning of each stage of the project, imagine what you will be presenting once you meet the next milestone. Identifying ahead of time what your stakeholders will be most eager to hear about (even though it will be weeks from now), will give you a framework for keeping track of the details that you will be presenting.
Your presentations will not only be about data or plan design. Your sponsors will want to know how your team's decisions were made. You should plan to report inputs you've obtained from other departments and interim judgments that have been made as the project unfolds.
Remember, everything we do in compensation is communication. Milestones happen to be one more example. As you achieve each milestone make sure you deliver enough details so your sponsor can answer effortlessly when an executive asks, "How's that project going?"
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at everythingiscommunication.com.
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