Stakeholder

Methodologies define a step-by-step process for delivering projects. Each methodology will describe each step in adequate depth, so that the project team understands what has to be done to deliver their project. This is quite different to a standardised knowledge framework such as the PMBOK® Guide (for more on this see: PMBOK -v- Methodology).

By using the same steps for every project the organisation undertakes risks and uncertainty are minimised and there is likely to be an overall saving of time and effort on projects.

Defining ‘your’ methodology

The key steps to follow are:

• Define what it is that you want from your methodology, the type of content it should contain and the way in which it will be used.
• Create a set of specific requirements. Some options include defining:
  • How much of the project lifecycle needs to be incorporated
  • How much detail should be included? What practical templates and examples are needed to help to complete the step quickly and easily?
  • Should it follow one of the worldwide project standards such as the PMBOK® Guide?
  • Can/should the system be easily customised suit all project types and sizes?
• Determine the best methodology to use:
  • Review the methodologies used currently by your organisation and compare them to your requirements to see if there is a good fit.
  • Review the commercially available methodologies to see if there is a good fit.
  • Select the option with the best fit to your requirements
• The best methodology is still only likely to have a 90% fit (or less), this is normal. Make sure you can customise the remaining elements to meet your requirements.
• Ensure adequate flexibility for the range of projects in your organisation.

Implementing the methodology

The key steps are:

• Create an Implementation Plan supported by a change management plan. Implementing a methodology is a significant organisational change.
• Run the implementation as a change management program, including customising the methodology for your environment. Stakeholder engagement is vital to the overall success of the initiative.
• Train the users and support staff in the methodology and ensure ongoing support.
• Ensure the methodology is followed.
• Start improving the methodology (for more on measuring and improving the organisations project management maturity see Mosaic’s OPM3 home page).

Improving the methodology

Processes are always capable of improvement. Observing the actual implementation of the methodology will define actions and outcomes within the following matrix.

Unauthorised, unproductive activities need to be stopped and authorised productive processes supported. The two zones for process improvement are refining or removing elements of the methodology that do not add value to the overall management of the project and incorporating unauthorised processes that are not in the methodology but that are being used add value.

The easiest and most important area for action is rectifying the unproductive processes already in the methodology. Care need to be taken to ensure the definition of ‘unproductive’ is understood. Most planning processes don’t produce anything and consume effort; superficially they can be classified as ‘unproductive’. In reality, effective planning contributes significantly to the efficient delivery of the project and its value to assist in the efficient execution of the work being planned is significant.

Excessively detailed planning though is usually counterproductive. Value judgements are needed to assess the point at which adding more detail or rigour becomes ‘planning overkill’ reducing the overall value of the process and conversely, how much detail can be safely removed from a planning processes to improve overall productivity before insufficient planning starts to cause problems.

Adapted from Firdman, H. E. (1991). Strategic information systems: Forging the business and technology alliance. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Adapted from Firdman, H. E. (1991). Strategic information systems: Forging the business and technology alliance. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Ensuring the methodology is seen as ‘productive’ is essential for it to be generally accepted and supported by your stakeholders.

Once the existing methodology is optimised and firmly in the ‘authorised and productive’ segment, the next area is to examine unauthorised processes that aid productivity and progressively incorporate these into your methodology. The ‘unauthorised and productive’ quadrant is where you find genuine innovation and opportunities for organisational gain.

Summary

No methodology works ‘out of the box’ they all need customisation and tailoring. However, the effort is worthwhile. OPM3 has demonstrated standardised processes that incorporate best practices can provide significant benefits to an organisation (see more on OPM3).

The challenge is balancing systemised processes with the need for adequate flexibility to deal with the circumstances of each unique project. An effective project management methodology needs core components, scalable components and optional components designed to meet the needs of your organisation.

The military doctrine of ‘command and control’ heavily influenced the structural approach to management characterised as ‘Scientific Management’ and the works of Taylor (1911). Scientific management assumes, amongst other things, that ‘supervision must be achieved through a clear chain of command and through the application of impersonal rules’ and that ‘only those at the top have the capacity and opportunity to direct the enterprise’. This philosophy has strongly influenced the development of project management (see: The Origins of Modern Project Management). But does this represent effective military management?

Following the defeat of the Prussian armies by Napoleon at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, the concept of ridged process-oriented command and control structures has been progressively replaced by the concept of ‘auftragstaktik’, or directive command. These ideas were originally championed by Major General Gerhard von Scharnhorst and were formalised by German Generalfeldmarschall Helmuth von Moltke who was the chief of staff of the Prussian Army for thirty years from 1857.

The core concept of auftragstaktik is ‘bounded initiative’. Provided people within the organisation hierarchy have proper training and the organisational culture is strong, the leader’s role is to clearly outline his/her intentions and rationale. Once this is understood, subordinate personnel can formulate their own plan of action for the tasks they are allocated and design appropriate responses to achieve the objectives based on their understanding of the actual situation, exploit opportunities and mitigate problems.

The investment necessary to achieve this capability is not simply a question of financial and material resources – time is critical both for the training of individuals and the development organisations. In von Moltke’s army, a junior Prussian commander exercising his initiative on the battlefield was most likely drawing upon a variety of resources at his disposal including:

1. his understanding of his commander’s explicitly stated directive that would have provided him with an appreciation of the situation, a specific task, and a description of the commander’s intentions;
2. his beliefs about his organisation, his role within that organisation, and the degrees of freedom available to him in the exercise of that role;
3. his expertise in the technical aspects of the military profession and
4. his understanding of his commander and his peers.

These latter aspects are captured in the notion of ‘implicit intent’, would provide him with the basis for his course of action and bound the solution space available to him.

A General may wish to defend a city, a Brigade Commander defend his designated sector and within the sector, a Platoon Commander may be tasked with establishing a road block which involves one of his NCOs establishing a strongpoint. The General does not need to instruct the NCO on how to site the strong point, camouflage it or man it. At each level, good leaders will think ‘two levels up’ and provide oversight ‘one level down’. The process is not random, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) define how specific tasks should be accomplished and ‘bounded initiative’ allows the individual leader to optimise the SOP for the specific circumstances he or she encounters to best support the overall intent of the commander. Von Moltke emphasised that he wanted to ‘steer’ initiative in the right direction.

These concepts are closely aligned with the human resources approach to management, which developed in the 1950s and 60s and emphasise a symbiotic relationship between individuals and organisations where ‘democratic leadership is the most effective means of managing’ and ‘openness and participation are the most effective means of demonstrating democratic leadership’.

On very small projects, a project manager may be capable of directing and controlling the work of everyone in the team. However, as soon as the team or the technology grows beyond a relatively simple system direct ‘command and control’ becomes impossible and attempting to impose a ridged hierarchy based on formal instructions will lead to inefficiencies. Effective leaders need to establish clear guidelines and a system of protocols, chain of command, and standard operating procedures so that everyone in the project team knows what they to do and who is accountable. The overall action of the team is unified by the leader’s intent; within this space sub-teams and smaller work groups are allocated their individual missions and tasks within that higher intent. Once this framework is in place, properly trained team members can go straight into the performing stage of their activity.

This alternative to ‘command and control’ developed by the Prussian military in the 1860s allows a far more effective and efficient use of resources. Auftragstaktik is not an easy option, the team needs better leadership, better training and the willingness to engage in taking ‘bounded initiatives’ but overall it offers a much better way of achieving the project’s objectives.

Applying these concepts does not reduce the importance of the normal project management artefacts such as the schedule and cost plan; what changes is the way these artefacts are used. In a decentralised management structure, the Project Plan defines the guidelines and framework the team will work within rather than attempting to prescribe how they will work (for more on this see: Project Controls in the C21 – What works / What’s fiction).

I never cease to be amazed by the number of people holding leadership roles in the project management community who denigrate ’soft’ skills. The latest attack on ‘soft’ skills is in a letter to the editor in the May edition of Project Magazine published by the APM, UK.

The Honorary Secretary of the APM Contracts and Procurement SIG, Gerry Orman states ‘soft skills are merely a form of manipulation’; and suggests including them in the knowledge framework for the project management profession will result in the dumbing down of our emerging profession. He also asserts the role of the project manager is to fulfil a contract, not deliver the project so apparently people leading the delivery of internal projects within organisations are not project managers!

Apart from the difficulty of defining projects in terms of one sourcing methodology, writing contracts, Orman seems to conveniently forget the thousands of contracts that end up in the courts each year because of the breakdown in relationships within the contract. Stakeholder management is a key skill for project managers, including identifying, prioritising the project’s stakeholders, and then developing effective communication within relationships that work (for more on this see WP1007 The Stakeholder Cycle). The success of the construction phase of Terminal 5 at Heathrow was largely due to BAA’s focus on the ‘soft’ skills needed to develop and sustain the integrated delivery teams that created the success. This was a revolution in procurement and supply chain management and led to this project being celebrated as the most successful construction project in the UK (for more on this see my presentation to the CIPS Australasia Strategic Procurement Forum in Auckland).

The same argument applies to most project management artefacts. The most perfectly developed schedule is totally useless if the information it contains is not communicated to the people who need to work to the plan; communication is a ‘soft’ skill. But communication on its own is not enough! The people receiving the communication need to understand the message and agree to use the schedule in the coordination of their work. This is unlikely to happen if the people have not been involved in the schedule development which requires more stakeholder engagement and communication, consensus building and a range of other ‘soft’ skills (see: Communication in organisations: making the schedule effective).

Putting it another way, developing an effective schedule that is useful because it is actually used to manage time on the project demands the project manager and/or project scheduler engage effectively with the people who will be responsible for implementing the schedule. This requires interpersonal, contextual and behavioural competencies.

Orman also states professional skills should be unique to the professions, examinable in a written exam and uses the medical profession as an example. Two members of our family recently completed a multi year journey to become qualified anaesthetists. Over the years there were many written examinations but there were also searching interviews and clinical assessments along the way and years of ‘apprenticeship’ under the direction of more senior professionals to ensure they were competent as well as knowledgeable. If medical professionals need more than book learning and written examinations why should project managers be any different?

Project success is achieved by persuading people in the project team to enthusiastically and collaboratively work together to achieve the contracted output. Developing a motivated team capable of achieving this requires a range of ‘soft’ skills including leadership, motivation, communication and conflict management to name a few. Organisations cannot do work; it is the people within the organisation that do the work and management is about directing and leading people!

Answering the question, what is more important, the ‘hard’ skills of scope management, scheduling and cost planning or the ‘soft’ skills of motivation, communication and leadership, is difficult. My feeling is the synergy of ‘hard’ skills powered by ‘soft’ skills will create a far more powerful engine for success than the sum of the two parts in isolation. Successful project managers need both capabilities either within their person or within their leadership team.

If we ignore stakeholders and the ‘soft’ side of our project management skill set we severely reduce our ability to meet our client’s requirements for on time on budget and on scope delivery. ‘Soft’ is not a synonym for easy!

Research by Dr. Brian Hobbs, University of Quebec at Montreal, Quebec, Canada published in a White Paper prepared for the Project Management Institute (PMI) highlights the precarious existence of the majority of Project Management Offices (PMOs). Approximately half of the PMO’s in existence are seeing their relevance or very existence questioned.

Whilst PMOs have been popular since the middle to late 1990’s and new PMOs are being created at a relatively high rate; PMOs are also being shut down or radically reconfigured at a similar rate. As shown in the figure below most PMOs in existence today are rather recent creations. The sample suggests more than half the PMOs in existence today (54%) were created in the last two years and only 17% have been in existence for more than five years.

This data suggests a PMO often has only a short time to demonstrate its ability to fit into the organisations culture and create value before it is restructured or closed down. We have looked at some of the issues and challenges associated with PMOs in a Mosaic White Paper ‘PMOs’.

Based on years of observation, the key to achieving an effective start up for a PMO has more to do with the PMO’s management being able to effectively manage their key stakeholders, particularly in the executive suites than any methodology or reporting processes the PMO may import or develop. For more on this see the numerous papers we have published [paper listing]. The key message is technical competence is never going to be enough to justify the existence of a PMO.

20 years ago, stakeholder management and shareholder/owner management were almost synonymous. In the intervening period, much has changed.

Most enlightened thinkers now place stakeholder management at the centre of effective business operations. The business needs to support, empower and satisfy the people working within the organisation, the general public and customers (now classes as Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR) and the owners of the business. All of these people are stakeholders.

Since the passing of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, organisational governance has become an important focus. For all types of organisation this is directly linked to governing the work of the people engaged in the work of the business; ie, stakeholders.

Since the GFC effective risk management has also become of increasing concern. Risk management is not the foolish attempt to avoid all risk – this is impossible, rather the effective management of risk within the risk tolerance thresholds of key stakeholders including the organisations owners and managers; ie, stakeholders.

Stakeholder Management

As summarised by the diagram above, business operations are intrinsically linked to, and require, effective governance, to meet the expectation of the organisations owners, within acceptable risk parameters to deliver value to society and the organisations clients or customers.

However, whilst stakeholder management is central to all of these processes, effective stakeholder management requires the allocation of scarce management resources to focus on the relationships between the work and the most important stakeholders. At the most fundamental level, the purpose of the Stakeholder Circle® methodology is understand ‘who’s who, and who’s important’ in the stakeholder community surrounding your work.

Once you understand this the effective management of stakeholders becomes possible. However, without the clarity of insight created by the careful analysis of the stakeholder community to determine who is really important the potential for wasted effort is enormous. As with most planning process, the payback from effort expended in analysis, is the reduced incidence of issues and problems as the work proceeds.

Can you afford not to focus some effort on effective stakeholder management?

Knowledge alone is not enough! To be effective in any sphere of life you need to be capable of applying knowledge effectively to achieve an outcome; this is competency. However, to be really effective you not only need to be capable of being competent, you need to be willing to act, to use your capability effectively. Effective (ie, competent) managers need to know what should be done, have the skills to do the work and be willing to actually do the work.

Putting this into context, project managers agree that having an effective schedule is important and also know they need knowledge of CPM theory (summarised in Chapter 3 of the PMI Practice Standard for Scheduling) and their scheduling software to produce a realistic and achievable schedule. But simply creating a schedule is not sufficient – the project manager needs to make effective use of the schedule if it is going to add value to the project delivery process.

This makes measuring and assessing management competence difficult. Observing an artefact is not sufficient, it is the way the competent manger behaves that make the real difference. Fortunately, the definition and assessment of competency is based on a defined structure:

First, there are three basic elements within the project management competency framework,
- technical competencies – what you do or produce,
- contextual competencies – how you work within the organisation / environment, and
- behavioural competencies – how you operate in the workspace and interact with people.

Then each element of competence is assessed in terms of:
- knowledge (what you know – tested by CAPM and PMP exams),
- skills (the capability to effectively apply the knowledge in the workplace and the artefacts produced) and
- attitude (how willing or effective you are in applying the skills).

This is normative competence and is the structure of PMI’s Project Manager Competency Development Framework and virtually every other professional competency framework including those developed by the AIPM, IPMA and GAPPS. However, the framework dates back to the industrial age where task repetition was common and one could learn the best-in-class approaches and emulate these to deliver new tasks.

In the ‘age of knowledge’ this is probably not sufficient, competent project managers in the 21st Century need to grow beyond normative thinking and embrace transformative practice. Project management competence is shifting from a process view towards autonomy; self reference and group self organisation. These qualities empower professional project managers to perform well despite prevalence of complexity and rapid change. They develop customised solutions for each new, unique, occasion; implementing the new solution requires the use of existing knowledge but will also generate new knowledge.

This constructivism theory has a basic assumption that each time you perform a new activity you build on your existing knowledge to acquire new insight and competence, and consequently engage in continuous learning. To be really effective, the organic ‘on-the-job’ learning should also be reinforced with the acquisition new information from journals, innovative courses, discussions with colleagues and participating in communities of practice.

Consolidating the new learning into tangible and useful knowledge needs reflection (to understand what has been learned) and possibly the assistance of a mentor to help unlock the complex factors needed to grow within yourself, develop creative solutions, and find new ways to succeed.

Yesterday’s competence is the foundation on which you can build tomorrows, but relying solely on yesterday’s skills is insufficient! Competent project managers know they need to keep learning and developing.

I published a post on the PMI Voices on Project Management blog a couple of weeks ago; Is This Your Project Stakeholder?. The post outlined a scenario and provided two options for readers to respond to.

• Option one was to focus on stakeholders and value with an enhanced probability of technical failure (running late and being over budget)
• Option two was to focus on the ‘iron triangle’ of time cost and scope.

A surprisingly high number of comments from people in the IT industry chose ‘option two’ – just do the job, a focus on short term technical achievement. Whereas managers with a broader perspective tended to select option one for a range of reasons.

You will have to wait a few days for my second post outlining my views on the best answer and why (I have just finished writing it and its now being edited). So check the Voices blog ‘home page’ in a few days or follow my posts.

In the interim though I have to say I was amazed at the number of IT practitioners who still seem to believe IT is somehow disconnected from the overall business of the organisation. I would suggest 99% of IT projects involve changes to business processes and will never deliver their full value if the people working in the business don’t embrace the changes.

Further, I would suggest probably greater then 50% of all IT projects are specifically instigated to support a business initiative or change. Projects in this category are integral to the value creation process – if the IT project team alienate key stakeholders the whole initiative could easily fail to deliver value to the organisation and become a waste of time, effort and money.

I discussed stakeholders and change management a couple of weeks ago (see post) and the ‘Value Chain’ was covered last year (see post)

Based on the responses to the PMI blog, there’s still a lot of work to do to convince IT practitioners that being on time and on budget are not directly related to value. Value is created when people (ie, stakeholders) actually use the IT implementation to generate wealth.

When considering stakeholders, there are very few one-to-one relationships. Most stakeholders are, and have been, influenced by a range of relationships in and around your project, program and your organisation.

Change Management and Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management is a key facet of organisational management where stakeholder management is often aligned with marketing, branding and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives.

Similarly, stakeholder management central to change management and the ability to realise the benefits the change was initiated to deliver. The benefits will not be realised unless the key stakeholder communities accept and embrace the changes.

Project and program management also has a focus on effective stakeholder management. In a change initiative, the project and/or program undertakes the work to deliver the elements needed to facilitate the change but are only ever part of the journey from concept to realised value.

A typical evolution of a change initiative would flow along these lines:

• The organisation decides on a major organisational restructure and as a consequence initiates a change management process and appointed a change manager.
• The change manager develops the business case for the program of work and the executives responsible for the organisations portfolio management approve the business case and agree to fund and resource the program.
• The program manager sets up the program management team, established the program management office (PgMO) and charters a series of projects to develop the various deliverables needed to implement the change.
• The projects deliver their outputs.
• The program integrates the outputs with the operational aspects of the organisation.
• The organisation’s management make effective use of the new systems and processes.
• Value is created for the organisation and its owners.

The change manager is the sponsor and primary client for the program but the people who need to be convinced of the value of changing are the operational managers and their staff. If the organisation does not accept and use the new systems and processes very little value is generated.

Within this scenario, stakeholders in the operational part of the organisation, and particularly the managers will be key stakeholders for a range of different entities:

• They are stakeholders in the organisation itself and part of the organisational hierarchy.
• They are stakeholders in the change process being managed by the change manager.
• As end users of the new systems and processes they are also stakeholders of the program.
• As subject matter experts (SMEs) they are likely to be stakeholders in at least some of the projects.

In one respect change management is stakeholder management. Therefore, in a change management initiative, stakeholder management should be an integrated process coordinated at the change manager’s level. All of the organisational elements working on the change need to coordinate their stakeholder management efforts to support the overall outcome. Confusing and mixed messages don’t help anyone.

But this is just one typical business scenario. When considering stakeholders, there are very few one-to-one relationships. Most stakeholders are, and have been, influenced by a range of relationships in and around your organisation. Consequently, focusing on a simple one-to-one view is unlikely to provide the best outcome for anyone.

Effective stakeholder management requires a mature organisational approach. One approach to developing this capability is the SRMM (Stakeholder Relationship Management Maturity) model described in my book. Stakeholder Relationship Management: A Maturity Model for Organisational Implementation. I will outline the SRMM model in a later post.

Several of my recent posts have focused on the need for effective communication up the organisation to senior managers and clients. Successful project management also needs good downwards communication to and with the project team.

I have just finished reading two Executive Book Summaries from Soundview Executive Book Summaries . The first was ‘How did that happen’ by Roger Connors and Tom Smith, the second ‘The five dysfunctions of a team’ by Patrick Lencioni. Together these books emphasise the importance of effective communication within the team.

Lencioni suggests members of truly cohesive teams; trust one another, engage in open discussion of ideas, commit to decisions and plans of action, hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans and focus on achieving effective results. Trust and respect are the elements needed to allow this to happen.

From the perspective of project delivery, the key elements are active discussions leading to decisions that are represented by the project plan and then focusing on achieving the plan. The agreed plan represents the expectations of the project manager and the team for the performance of the work. But how to turn these expectations into reality?

Connors and Smith show how the project manager can hold the team responsible for results in a positive, principled way. The first step is for the PM to test the expectations contained in the plan to ensure each one is consistent with the overall plan, achievable by the currently available resources, and that the ultimate fulfilment of the expectation is measureable. An expectation may be a document, a piece of code, a successful test or any of the other elements needed to deliver the project to meet the expectations of the client.

Communicating specific expectations to the team members responsible for the work uses a why, what, when approach. The ‘why’ needs to be compelling on a personal level to the individuals concerned; this is helped if they are already committed to team achievements. The ‘what’ requires clarity; not just about the deliverable but also the boundaries of the work and the available support. Lastly, the ‘when’ needs to be precisely defined. The schedule, WBS, and other project documents usually contain the needed ‘what and when’ information, the challenge is using these documents as effective communication tools to build commitment and motivation in the team.

To maintain accountability, it is vital the PM routinely inspects what is expected. Making sure the ongoing work is aligned with the original expectations and any changes are properly managed. Holding people accountable needs the PM to precisely understand things as they really are and to be able to identify and diagnose any problems. Accountability is not ‘blame’ it is a joint process to commit to the truth and then act to develop solutions, overcome obstacles and deliver results.

Accountability is the key! Team members hold themselves and their colleagues accountable and work together to achieve results that meet the expectations of the PM and the project’s clients. To achieve accountability, open and effective communication between everyone in the team is critical and the PM has to be the ‘first among equals’ leading the process. This is one of the reasons a PM should spend 90% of her time communicating.

More next time.

The importance of understanding culture in designing successful communications to influence and inform stakeholders cannot be understated. But as discussed in previous posts, culture is multi-dimensional. Some of the facets include:

• corporate culture – how the organisation works
• industry/professional culture – the way people in a profession work and relate
• age – baby boomers, Gen X, Y and Z (at least in the western world)
• national/ethnic cultures

The last of these facets tends to be over simplified in many texts. There is not just an east/west divide! Robert J House in Culture, Leadership and Organizations (2004 – Sage Publishing) reported on the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) program that is undertaking a long term study of 62 societies.

The GLOBE study identifies ten national culture clusters that have distinctive leadership and management behaviours:

1. Asian:
   a. South Asia – Philippines to Iran, including ASEAN countries and India
   b. Confucian Asia – China, Japan and Korea plus Singapore, Hong Kong and Tiwan
2. European:
   a. Anglo – North America, UK, Australia /NZ and ‘white’ South Africa.
   b. Germanic – Germany, Austria and Netherlands
   c. Latin – Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Israel.
   d. Eastern – Poland and Greece to Russia.
   e. Nordic – Denmark to Finland, Iceland.
3. Arab – Qatar and Iraq to Morocco
4. Sub-Sahara Africa including ‘black’ South Africa.
5. Latin America – Mexico to Argentina.

The GLOBE study focused on the interrelationship between societal culture, organisational culture and organisational leadership. Attributes such as uncertainty avoidance, power distance and performance -v- human orientation were considered.

Yoshitaka Yamazaki in Learning Styles and Typologies of Cultural Differences (2005 – Science Direct) identifies six dimensions:

-  Cultural typologies in anthropology
     1. High-context vs. low-context cultures
     2. Shame vs. guilt cultures
-  Cross-cultural management literature
     3. Strong vs. weak uncertainty avoidance
     4. M-type organizations vs. O-type organizations
-  Cross-cultural psychology
     5. Interdependent-self vs. independent-self
     6. Field-dependent and field-independent

High context societies place great importance on ambience, decorum, the relative status of the participants in a communication and the manner of the message’s delivery. Effective communication depend on developing a relationship first, because most of the information is either in the physical context or in the context of the relationship, therefore relatively little needs to be in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message. Communication in low context societies tends to have the majority of the information vested in the explicit code transferred by the message. People from high context societies (eg, France or China) may think people from a low context society (eg, Germany or USA) think they are stupid because the low context people include all of the information in a message. Similarly, people from high context societies are unlikely to express their disagreement or reservations in an open meeting, circumstances and relationships are as important as work so they would comment in a more private or appropriate occasion but only if the opportunity is provided.

Shame or guilt considers whether a person has an outwards orientation based on the judgement of others or an inward orientation focused on their core ethical values to encourage high performance and moderate poor performance.

O-Type organisations are where the employees see themselves as a permanent part of the group; they are part of a social collective. M-Type organisations are more focused on individual achievement.

Field-dependent societies adhere to structures and perceive or experience communication in a global fashion. Field-independent societies and people are analytical; they can self-structure situations and have self-defined goals and reinforcements.

These differences in approach were one of the reasons I posed the question ‘do we need cultural extensions to the PMBOK?’ (see: PMI’s Voices on Project Management). But while understanding cultural stereotypes may be a helpful starting point, no grouping or stereotyping will provide the necessary subtleties needed for important communication.

Firstly, everyone’s experience is unique and the person you wish to communicate with will have been moulded by a range of influences including the corporate and professional cultures they have worked within. Second, no study I am aware of has focused on the effect of the global communication network on national cultural behaviours. The concept of baby boomers, X, Y and Z Gen, is very much a western phenomena, there are certainly likely to be age groupings in other cultures but where the divides lie and how technology interacts with the national characteristics is largely unknown (at least to me). Thirdly, people travel widely for both education and work, even after returning home they will have absorbed some of the influences of the other cultures they have lived in.

So how should you approach the planning of an important communication? As a start, try to define the normal communication mode of the person you are seeking to influence or inform. Understanding national characteristics helps, but is not enough; you need to seek information from a wide range of sources. Err on the side of caution if there is any doubt about the optimum mode for communication. Then carefully observe the effect of your initial communication on the receiver and adjust the mode until you achieve a satisfactory result.

My paper for the PMI Asia Pacific Congress, Beyond Reporting – The Communication Strategy, is also focused on the topic of effective communication, as is my next book, Advising upwards: A Framework for Understanding and Engaging Senior Management Stakeholders due for publication in 2011. So expect more on this subject in the New Year.