Abstract
Project managers in successful companies spend up to 90% of their time communicating (Kerzner, 2004, p. 465). Many project managers, though, view communicating simply as a necessary evil or chore that must be performed; however, the very survival of the project may depend on how well its public relations are managed. This is certainly true for high-profile, publicly funded initiatives in which the whims of politics come into play. But even corporate projects can fall out of favor, with executives simply transferring their resources, attention, or budget to the next “great idea.”
Unfortunately, the project team does not have the luxury of simply working hard and delivering the project according to plan and in a communication vacuum. Savvy project managers learn to turn the routine artifacts of project management— like project schedules, team meetings, and tollgate phase reviews—into communications channels to keep their project and its benefits on the “tops of minds” within their organizations. Savvy project managers learn to become public relations experts, stressing project benefits and not just data about their project's performance.
Public relations has been defined as “the art and social science of analyzing trends, predicting their consequences, counseling organizational leaders, and implementing planned programs of action, which will serve both the organization and the public interest.” (Zhao, 1999, Encyclopedia of Business, 2nd ed) This paper identifies the tips and techniques to help you deliver high-impact project public relations as you perform your daily project management duties.
Preparing for Your Public Relations Campaign
Like a successful project, a good public relations campaign starts with a good communications plan. Communication planning is determining project stakeholder information needs and defining a communication approach for each constituency (Project Management Institute, 2008, p. 251). The first step is to audit your list of stakeholders for the different needs and expectations that must be considered for your project to be well communicated, which are as follows:
- Technology needs and limitations, language and translation requirements, and cultural considerations about hierarchical access to information should be accounted for with geographically and culturally diverse groups of stakeholders.
- Your goal is not just to share data, but to consistently sell the merits of your project. Think about what is important to each group of stakeholders. What critical success factors does each group care about? Plan to tailor the content, format, timing, frequency, and delivery methods to each group.
- A good project Public Relations (PR) campaign acts to extend your communications plan, supplementing information with a continued emphasis on the project's advantages and benefits.
Preparation Principles
Message Substance
Good public relations is not always about presenting a rosy picture, but getting vital information to critical stakeholders, in a timely manner with a controlled message. Your PR campaign needs to provide valuable content to the stakeholders with whom you will be communicating.
From a public relations perspective, scope can be an area that generates high potential for confusion because it is the very essence of what defines the project's success. One of the worst morale killers is when a high-level stakeholder demonstrates late in the project that he or she is misaligned with the team on issues around scope. That is why project managers should begin communicating what is in and out of scope early in the process and often to wide audiences of stakeholders, within and beyond the project team.
The table referenced in Exhibit 1 shows different communication channels and which project documents might be used to communicate valuable project scope information to each group.
Exhibit 1 – Scope Communication Venue Table
The project schedule is a key communication tool because it contains the information that stakeholders are most keenly interested in: the progress of work against the milestones. It should be structured so that it is easy to maintain and update and organized around the deliverables that stakeholders are interested in. Project schedules are too important to be maintained only in project team meetings. They add credibility to the project status message. Communication Channels
When planning your PR campaign, also think about the different communication channels you will use. Consider your different audiences, the different content they are interested in, and their preferences for communication. Think about the project communication methods that are already effective within your organization and identify which ones need a fresh approach. Which audiences seem well informed and which don't? Which audiences aren't getting any project communications at all?
Ideally, your plan should tie all of your different messages, channels, and audiences into one cohesive, well-prepared operation. Consider McDonald's: They have different messages for different consumers: they appeal to “plugged in” adults by offering free WiFi, to mothers by talking about the nutritional value of their kid's meals, and to kids by offering toys with characters from popular movies.
McDonald's then uses a variety of media channels to get these messages to their consumer groups, with advertisements on television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, the web, and social media, like Facebook and Twitter. The end result is that each group hears their messages from several sources. The goal with your project's PR campaign is the same: send the right message to the right group, through a variety of channels so you can be sure everyone gets the message.
When incorporating social media into your PR campaign, pay special attention to security and privacy issues. The appeal of social media is its wide accessibility and its easy access, two strengths that can backfire on you or someone on your team if you share something you shouldn't.
Success Recognition Mechanisms
When designing your project's public relations strategy, it is important to incorporate success recognition mechanisms. Too often, the most successful projects are the quietest ones; an accumulation of many small achievements that, by themselves, may seem too small to talk about, but accumulate to make a winning outcome. The heroes of these projects are those team members who can perform their duties according to plan with high quality and low drama, day in and day out. Sadly, that type of effort often doesn't get the notoriety it deserves. As chief marketing officer for your project, you must maintain the necessary focus and attention on the accomplishments and victories throughout the project.
It is important to create a strategy to herald the small “wins,” not just the big ones, and outline them in the communications plan. When talking about intermediate achievements or small accomplishments, the most effective strategies don't just state information but also convey the value of the achievement to business stakeholders. Recognizing the small wins publicly throughout the project is a great way to give credit to the team members who deserve it and quietly draw attention to successful projects, milestones, risk mitigation strategies, or issue resolutions that might otherwise be overlooked.
Success recognition becomes even more essential in troubled projects in which team credibility and morale may be diminished. Troubled projects usually require frequent feedback loops and their communications should follow suit. Open, honest, and straightforward discussions of issues help assure stakeholders that problems have been acknowledged. As the team begins to turn the project around, it is critical that these wins are broadcasted publicly.
Like anything else in the planning process group, planning for a PR campaign needs to be completed before you start executing it. Set up an Intranet page for your project, in advance, or identify and price physical artifacts before your project even starts. Be sure to determine in advance who is responsible for maintaining and updating the success recognition mechanisms and frequencies and which events will trigger their updates, and document these decisions in the communications plan.
Executing Your PR Campaign
A successful campaign depends on your ability to create opportunities to talk about the project. The following section describes how to use existing communications channels for maximum PR benefit and how to identify new channels to continually stress return on investment and keep the stakeholders excited about the project's goals and benefits.
Project Charter Presentations
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
Tangible support from management starts with issuing a project charter (Verzuh, 2008, p. 81). While the project team has not yet done the formal scope definition work when the project charter is issued, many stakeholders will start the project with preconceived notions about scope that are just wrong. If allowed to persist, these misconceptions can be disastrous for the success of the project and the morale of the team. Project charter presentation meetings can be a great tool to uncovering these misalignments in stakeholder vision.
How to Leverage This Channel
Use this channel for emphasizing the project's ROI and benefits to the organization. As soon as the project charter is finalized and approved by the sponsor, schedule charter presentations with as many of your stakeholder communities as possible to present an overview of the project and demonstrate your sponsor's support. It is also a good opportunity to clarify any known exclusions of the project and clear up any misconceptions stakeholders may have (Cook, 2005, p. 28).
Because this meeting happens early, typically before any major plan deviations occur, public approval for the project is usually at its highest. Capitalize on that goodwill to generate early excitement for the project and identify “friends of the project” throughout the organization.
Executive Sponsor/Steering Committee Meetings
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
The executive sponsor or steering committee update is one of the most important meetings for a project's PR campaign because it is critical that sponsors not forget how much the project needs their support, publicly and privately. They may have approved the project months ago, but chances are it's now only one of many things going on in a busy organization (Portny, 2001, p. 237). Regular meetings with this group create a channel to showcase accomplishments so that this group can also become PR champions for the project. When the team begins to struggle with challenges, it becomes even more important to brief this group in a controlled manner before they start hearing rumors.
How to Leverage This Channel
Your goal is to have a supportive, collaborative, well-informed steering committee. Always be honest and forthcoming with challenges faced by the team, sharing risk mitigation strategies and options. Provide this group with quality information about project successes and challenges and prepare them to help with PR efforts, as well as help control the other stakeholders.
Project Team Status Meetings
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
Good public relations are as important within the project team as they are outside the project team. A team that understands the long-term benefits their project will deliver to the organization can be powerful PR allies and can help other shareholders focus on the goals when times are tough and frustrations are high. Done correctly, the project status team meeting can become a valuable asset that team members look forward to.
How to Leverage This Channel
Collect status from team leads in separate, offline conversations prior to the team meeting. Use the meeting time to review the status information, update issues and risks, capture new issues and risks, and brainstorm solutions as a team to demonstrate to the team how much you value their time. Your PR goal for this meeting is to make sure the project team members are communicating amongst themselves and recognizing project goals and successes, while respecting their time and their workload.
Risk closures are PR event opportunities, as are removing issues from the issues list. In addition to all of the positive benefits the project gains from risk management exercises, successfully handling risks as a group is one of the best team-building exercises available to a project manager.
Stakeholder Meetings
Why This Channel is Important for Project Public Relations
Project stakeholders are the riskiest groups for project PR, whose interests must not be overlooked. If neglected, they can derail the project. These are the groups that may provide resources, may ultimately own the project, or will be impacted but don't know it yet. Actively managing stakeholder expectations decreases the risk of project failure and limits disruptions (Project Management Institute, 2008, p. 262).
How to Leverage This Channel
Leverage your PR principles and your “friends of the project” to set expectations appropriately about expected inconveniences or hardships that may occur during the project. When your project runs into unexpected problems, help your stakeholders keep their “eyes on the prize,” focusing on the ultimate organizational objectives. Use this channel to advertise wins and victories, such as completion of milestones, resolution of issues or closure of significant risks, continually stressing goals and benefits of the project to the organization. Continue to get input from them about the project benefits they are looking forward to; this will keep your project high on their agendas.
Tollgate Meetings
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
A tollgate phase review provides periodic checkpoints to ensure that major stakeholders are in alignment on the goals and accomplishments of the project and forces problems to “bubble up” earlier in the project rather than later. Capturing these data and commentary leaves no doubt as to where the team stands and gives concrete evidence that the team has the sponsors’ support to move forward. It also gets the team what is usually some well-deserved recognition for their hard work. When done right, the tollgate review can also serve as a beneficial team-building event, formally giving credit and praise where due.
How to Leverage This Channel
Structure your meeting so that no one is allowed to simply vote “No” on whether a project can move forward to the next phase. If a stakeholder believes a project should not progress to the next phase, require that he or she also adds what it would take to get to “Yes,” in very clear, actionable terms.
As the chief marketing officer of the project, this is a real opportunity to solicit feedback and praise for the work efforts of the team thus far. These are the PR “gold nuggets” that can then be published in other channels.
Lessons Learned Meetings
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
The lessons learned session, held at the end of a phase, helps us determine what went right or wrong with processes, identify adjustments, and document these for the future (Verzuh, 2008, p. 314). You want to demonstrate that your project will have a legacy. Many organizations repeat the same mistakes continually, and only the most mature organizations recognize and grow from them. The positive lessons (i.e., what went right) documented in a lessons learned session are great PR material, but even the negative lessons can be spun in a positive way.
How to Leverage This Channel
Document plans for process improvements to implement for the remainder of the current project as well as for future projects. As public ambassador for your project, take this opportunity to broadcast how the lessons learned session has impacted not only your current project, but the impact it will have on all future projects your organization undertakes.
Project Change Control Board Meetings
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
Change happens, and controlling the chaos around project changes is an important part of the project manager's role. A project manager's best asset in controlling changes is a change control board, a committee of stakeholders with the responsibility for approving changes (Cook, 2005, p. 68). This is the group that will support the project manager in his or her extremely important roles of limiting changes on the project and selling approved, or denied, changes within the stakeholder groups.
How to Leverage This Channel
Convening the change control board to rule on project change requests reinforces the project stakeholders’ sense of ownership of the project scope, schedule, and budget, and provides a mechanism for protecting the project team against taking on extra work without the benefit of the time or extra resources to accomplish it.
Decisions made by the change control board are often sensitive or unpopular, with one or several coalitions being disappointed, and need to be communicated quickly. The project manager should enlist the change control board for help in crafting and delivering the message to ensure proper organizational support and avoid undermining the project.
Non-Project Meetings
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
There may be many meetings not associated with the regular pace of the project calendar that are good to plug into for informational briefings, like annual leadership meetings, quarterly sales meetings, or more regularly recurring group or departmental meetings. These meetings and events offer great opportunities to meet with members of the organization who rarely get a chance to learn about the project.
How to Leverage This Channel
Your goal here is to bring your message to a new audience to generate public awareness, eliminate any misconceptions, and generally increase goodwill for the project. Go one step further and engage in “PR from the bottom up”—reach out to the groups your stakeholders represent. You are spending considerable time communicating with your stakeholders, but are their stakeholders getting the message?
The task of delivering presentations can be shared between key project team members, which helps develop presentation skills among team members, increases a sense of ownership, promotes unity within the team, and shows that you aren't the only one enthusiastic about the project.
Don't overlook the most informal opportunities to promote the project—hallway conversations, over lunch, at the water cooler, with people who are further removed from the official project stakeholder groups.
Social Media
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
There are many benefits to using social media. Social media can be very efficient, because the same content created for other channels can be repurposed for social media. They are appealing to your stakeholders as a way to receiving project information, for the same reasons they use social media for personal information: because it's fun and it can balance a project's PR campaign and attract some attention within your organization.
While conventional wisdom says that social media are used primarily by the young, this is not really true. According to Forrester Research, the percentage of Boomers consuming social media was 46% for younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for older Boomers (ages 53 to 63) in 2007. By 2008, those numbers increased to 67% and 62%, respectively. (Perez, 2009, ¶2) In its Boomers and Social Media report, eMarketer notes that Boomers love Facebook far more than other social media sites, with 73% of the group claiming to maintain a Facebook profile. (Van Grove, 2010, ¶4)
How to Leverage This Channel
Here are some ideas for adding social media to your PR campaign.
Blogs/Wikis
Blogs and Wikis are great ways to share project information and foster collaboration with input from numerous sources and can be used as a central location for project information and for gathering feedback. Many software applications that support blogs or wikis enable varying degrees of security so that you can control who posts editorials or comments to the site or requires that information be reviewed before it is posted.
YouTube
YouTube gives you another channel to reach your stakeholders. Posting content on YouTube is fun, it's different, and can help build a team or ease tension during high-anxiety times on your project. You can even create a YouTube Channel for your project, tell stakeholders about it, and let them stay tuned for project information.
Twitter is best used for team building. It is the fastest and easiest social media channel to use and is dedicated to micro-blogging, or communications limited to 140 characters, called “Tweets.” Create a hash tag for your project, a unique name preceded by the # sign, and make sure all of your Tweets include it. Then your users can search for all the Tweets about the project. This can be particularly engaging for a dispersed team.
For example, you and your project team members in North America Tweet about the project throughout the day, including the tag, #ProjGoLive. Then, your team members in Asia Pacific come to work, and see all the day's Tweets from North America and post their own Tweets during their work day using the same tag. When the North American team comes in the next morning, they search Twitter for #ProjGoLive and see the Asia Pacific team's progress.
Facebook/MySpace
Creating a Facebook or MySpace page for a project generates excitement and gives you another way to engage with shareholders, using the same content already created but distributing it in a new way. Use the privacy settings to determine who to share what content with. Your shareholders can contribute thoughts, ideas, and feedback by posting comments and links on your page.
Linked In/PM Net
Most people are familiar with these sites as places to market your skills as a professional, but they are also great ways to leverage the expertise of others in your field. If you are trying to solve a particular project problem, use LinkedIn or PM Net groups to find the people who would be talking about your problem. If the group doesn't exist, you can create one. Pose your question to the group, learn from experts outside your organization or immediate social network, and apply that knowledge to improving your project. You will get some attention for your project, your organization, and yourself as a professional.
Sharepoint/Google Sites
If your organization won't let you use external social media sites, then make the tools you can use look more like social media! Study the social media channels your stakeholders use and think about what attracts them, and then add some interactivity to your internal tools. Make it fun! Start a blog on your SharePoint Site. Have a contest. Post some pictures or a video. Share a PowerPoint document, but dress it up with music or animation. Make your internal tools look more like social media and less like dreary work applications.
Victory Corners
Why This Channel is Important for Public Relations
A victory corner is a success recognition channel designed to herald project accomplishments. It stands as a permanent record of achievement so that important milestones and objectives are not forgotten. This can go a long way in supporting team pride and morale, as well as keeping the image of winning front and center.
How to Leverage This Channel
Be sure to broadcast news promptly. These channels are most effective when information is available to a broad audience of stakeholders. Victory corners can take on many forms, but they should be appropriate for the culture of the environment. Some ideas for a victory corner include:
- An actual place (a billboard or war room) or physical artifacts (posters, flags, pennants, a funny object passed around the work area of the project team members)
- Weekly installments of progress reports or dashboards published on the Intranet site or project repository, accessible to stakeholders
- A virtual “trophy wall” for the team: a blog, wiki, web page, page on a SharePoint site, Facebook site, Twitter feed, YouTube channel, or other social media venues
- A social event hosted by the team for the stakeholder group, or vice versa, once or recurring
One of the most straightforward ways to emphasize success is to celebrate. Whether by planning a big party event or simply bringing treats to a meeting, a celebration helps underscore a victory and reinforces the behaviors that contributed to it. A creative project team can come up with endless ideas to celebrate wins that reflect the goals of their project and the values of their organization.
Conclusion
You need more than a communications plan to keep your project funded, your stakeholders engaged, and your project team motivated. Many of your project artifacts, meetings, and communications deliverables can be employed to sell your project, throughout its life cycle and beyond, by implementing a strategic public relations campaign.
