the Bridger

May 2, 2010

Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 5

Filed under: Requirements, Sales and Marketing, Strategic thinking, communication skills, management skills, product development, soft skills — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 1:43 pm

What’s the right strategy for me?

Previously:
Bridging between the web and the real world
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 2
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 3
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 4

 

In defining a marketing strategy you will as a minimum need to:

  1. Define your USP and write it down.
  2. Define your target market
  3. Write down the benefits of your product/service to that market
  4. Position your product/service in comparison to it’s rivals so that it appeals to your market (2)
  5. Define the activities you will engage in to deliver your messages and monitor results e.g. networking, direct mail, telesales, events, etc
  6. Develop the messages that suit each method of delivery, drive home your USP, consolidate your positioning statement and motivate the required actions from your target market

Your USP, positioning statements, Elevator pitch and all that good stuff

Me (the business) has to be understood first and that is often where the exercise is rejected then the products come under the microscope.

Most networkers will tell you how important trust is in selling your products and services and this is the section that deals with that trust. Trust is not in a product, or service, but in a person or organisation delivering it and you simply can’t afford to ignore this aspect of your offering.

The simple and obvious questions 

What do I stand for? what do I want out? What am I prepared to give?  Where are my boundaries? Now you need to step it up a notch to look at yourself through your customer’s eyes.
What do they stand for? What does it mean to me? Is it an image that inspires me to deal with them? Are their changes that would improve this image and influence me to buy from them?

Now the money question
How good are my products? Who are they aimed at and why should they buy?
Now from a customer viewpoint

Do I use their products? Why? What would motivate me to start/stop, how do they compare to the opposition? And how does this influence me? Is there anything unique , or memorable about them?

It is rare that this exercise does not lead to a startling difference between the internal view and the customer viewpoint and there is always something to be learned, but be warned, the results must be consumed with a measure of common sense.
The idea of giving the customer what he wants is fallacy. The customer wants you broke and giving him products for free, even products he will never use. You have to talk to realistic customers of the kind you are able to sell to profitably. You have to ask the right questions carefully and explore the answers if in doubt.

Before you can establish a strategy for your marketing you need to be confident that you have  got your proposition right and you are projecting an appropriate image successfully. Without that you can spend a lot of cash and effort for very little return.

Unity of thought and action in all things is the key

Two messages that reinforce a strong influential theme is three times as powerful as one message. Two messages that contradict each other, even a little bit can be very damaging.

Messages in the marketing context mean every communication and action that says something to your customers.  If you deliver a day late without an apology, that sends a message even more effectively than an expensive TV advert only not the one you had intended. The lesson that needs to be learned here is Don’t over guild the lilly.

If you are not going to be able to deliver it consistently, drop it from all offers and don’t promise it. This is the commonest mistake in business and it is even more upsetting when you come to realise that the customer didn’t even rate it in his buying criteria, but now he’s upset because you promised and didn’t deliver.

E-commerce and the retail shop, email and the call-centre, networking and the marketing campaign

Have you ever dealt with an organisation, or a professional who managed to get these aspects of the business integrated even a little bit?  I certainly haven’t.

  • You buy something online, but you are not allowed to return it in the shopping mall.   
  • You see an advert 15 times in the course of an evening telling you how your bank value their customers, you call about your account and ten minutes later, with steam coming from your ears, you finally get through to a call centre person who is trained only in dealing with irate customers. Two minutes later you put the phone down in despair, no wiser.
  • You meet the boss at an event and tell him you need a big order and he is very pleased and very helpful. You call in a few days later to order and you are told, it will be two weeks now before we can deliver, if only you’d called in yesterday.
  • The call centre reminds you that your annual subscription is overdue, because they have never been told that you paid by direct debit last week

We both know that this list could go on for many pages and hopefully you are beginning to think of this in terms of conflicting messages and wasted effort. Fixing this type of thing should be at the top of every marketing strategy.

Don’t take a sledgehammer to crack a nut

The most difficult thing about developing a strategy for marketing can be to avoid starting at the beginning and making too big a job out of it.

If you are happy enough that you don’t have the problems highlighted above then in reading this you have done enough and you can get straight to the point.

 Billions are wasted every year developing strategies that are consigned to the bin by changes in events within the first year, so stick to the highest possible level and don’t get bogged down in detail.
If you want to spend a little more time at this stage then I would strongly advise a couple of workshops facilitated by an experienced external person. In particular PEST is a great way to avoid falling foul of Political, Environmental, Sociological and Technological drivers that render your plans useless.
SWOT is a powerful tool to help you define your Strengths and Weaknesses and to explore. Opportunities and Threats facing your business.   Done well with a good cross section of the team, these can be lively and informative short sessions that afford a chance to take stock and to improve management communication.

Defining your target market

Your target market is a segment or segments of the overall market that you believe is sufficiently large to deliver your targeted sales volume and offers you the best possible opportunity to make sales. Why waste time climbing for the high apples, get the easy ones.

When defining your market segments the best strategy will often be to understand;

 1. The jobs they want done as opposed to features they might want

2. How easily accessed they are
3. How profitable they are to your business.

e.g.  If you are a Lawyer who used to work in the city and now you are in practice, you have a Unique proposition in terms of your financial knowhow, you may be able to highlight a large group of potential clients who engage in financial dealings but are not big enough to retain a lawyer and you may find that there is an easy route to access them all through a particular association.  Provided this is sufficiently profitable for you, you have clearly defined your target market using my criteria.

Defining the benefits to your target market

 

If you remember, we focused on ” job done” as opposed to features when defining the target market, very simply this is because the benefit is that it allows your customer to get a job done.
This way there is less confusion over language and better defined offering in terms of language.

 

e.g. The tiler isn’t looking for a “better cutter”, but a “smoother cut”, or a “faster cut”

Don’t forget emotional drivers

Emotions play a large part in all purchases, even the very logical ones, but many purchases are dominated by emotion.  Cars are bought for the feeling they give the driver when he sits into it.
Homes are bought for what they say about the owner as much as anything else. The list goes on.

People are very swarm conscious and like to be hiding comfortably in a crowd doing what the crowd are doing. The underlying driver is fear of being singled out for r ridicule if they get it wrong, so people need a way out and they need social approval for their decisions.

You must identify these social drivers and write them down

Remember to record the constraints

It may be that only at certain times of year, or when certain conditions occur, will your customers make a buying decision, or that certain seasons are better.  Remember the low hanging fruit theory and record all of these constraints so you can use them to your benefit.

Define your positioning statements

Positioning statements are statements that help the customer understand your proposition by comparing it to the competition and by comparing it to other known things.
“The Venice of the North”.   “Accounting’s answer to Coca Cola”.  These are positioning statements.
They very simply and subtly say a great deal about what you think of your product, they are very easy to remember, because they follow the basic principal of how we remember things and if you can get the customer to accept this comparison, you will very powerfully and memorably define your product’s position in your customer’s mind.
Nothing in my view is more powerful in the marketing strategy than getting the positioning right and then driving it home consistently.

Plan the activity at a high level.

At a strategic level you don’t want times and dates etc, but you do want these key elements:

  1. Clarity about how and where you will deliver your messages for what outcome and how you will measure success.
  2. You should have a regular review strategy to make sure your strategy is working and to make adjustments when appropriate
  3. You should have clear targets in terms of sales, enquiries, list growth, share of voice, share of mind etc
  4. You should have a budget defined
  5. Divide your activities into Hunting and Farming (Hunting being the search for new contacts)

To help you decide on tactics, the best approach is to go back to your notes on target market and n particular the bit about accessibility. At that point you decided that this segment was accessible, how?
Who and what are their strongest influencers?
Where do they go? What do they read? Do they network? Can you get them to join a newsletter? are they in your database and reachable with certain types of media?

 

A simple chart like this one can help

  Offline Networking Online Networking PR Email Events Telesales SEM Website
London engineers £1 to £10m Meet senior  management at key engineering focused gatherings:
Institute of ..		 Directors will stay in touch with opposite numbers and forge new relationships Monthly announcements on the following themes:
1
2		 Quarterly newsletter with valuable key trends analysis Invite up to 50 key people for working lunches Add 200 names to the database of potential customers every month Target buyers of widget who is searching for “custom”
max budget

£n

 Provide all the information buyers need

Track visitors from all electronic messaging.

Integrate this information with offline communications records
Target 10 Potentials 50 new relationships 20% improvement in share of mind. 15 enquiries monthly 40 new potentials 2400 new contacts 10 orders per month Traffic growth 10%
Repeat/New

7:4
London legal  practices £1m+ Meet senior  management at industry gatherings Minimal as they don’t do it much Occasional announcements  timed with ..   Working breakfasts  with short informative  training sessions   Target  all widget searches Use ecommerce to capture small orders.

 

Email key bridging pages to the mailing list monthly
Target 30 potentials              
Total sales forecast                
Cost                
ROI                

 

 

Develop the messages

 

1. Write out your USP

2. Write an elevator pitch that you can give to anyone in any circumstance and they will immediately “get it”.  Imagine being forced to still use it word for word in ten years.

Define the segments by name
Define the jobs they want done
Define the emotional drivers involved
Define their key influencers

Define each of the delivery methods you have proposed for this segment

For each of these individual segment/method instances, write out what action you want them to take and what would make them take it.

For each of the above, write out the message to be delivered
Write out an example of body copy.

The actual body copy can be created close to the event so that the language and mood of the time can be built into it.

e.g.

Segment1 Type Influencers Job done Emotional Action Message
email Peer group afraid of being left behind.
Competition  . sales people telling them we are no good.
Trade body wanting their business instead		 Enter new markets.

Find new products

 Mustn’t be seen to fail even a little.

 

Must feel comfortable with these new ideas.

 

We are afraid of not being up to the job

 www Message1.doc
Networking enquire Message.doc
website enquire Message.doc
telephone Agree to a visit  

Message 2.doc
events Invite us to tender Message 3.doc

 
Direct mail Make an enquiry Message4.doc
Newsletter Visit the www

 

I expect it is much more evident what your message should be saying when you work form this chart and a good copywriter should be able to produce powerful collateral very quickly.
 What is especially good is that all your activity is now delivering consistent focused messages direct to receptive audiences and they can continue the conversation across the website, networking, events etc without any confusion. If you work a little on timing and language you can achieve a great deal from your new marketing strategy.

If you invest in some tools to help you coordinate all these communications it will make your job a great deal easier

April 18, 2010

Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 3

Filed under: Internet, Sales and Marketing, Strategic thinking, communication skills, management skills, product development, soft skills — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 10:54 am
Previously:
Bridging between the web and the real world
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 2

Are there really clear parallels between Soviralnetbusworks and Sales and Marketing theory?

This is bound to be  an area of some contention, for the reasons mentioned previously. Most networkers, especially online, are motivated by a need to be out and about finding customers combined paradoxically with their powerful fear of and resistance to actually selling their services.

If you draw parallels then you have to face the big purple elephant again I.E.  Why are you in a business that you are afraid to sell to customers? If you don’t believe in it, who will?

There is a fairly popular and utterly flawed theory that underlies most networking activity, which supports the latter folly and it goes something like this: 
 If you meet the same 60 people every month for a year and you tell them what you do and then you are nice to them every time you meet and if you pass a few scraps of leads to a few of them, eventually one of them will order from you.
The reasons it’s flawed are simply these:

1.   I won’t, and neither will you, wait for the next meeting to place an order with somebody who said hello to me. When I need a widget today, I’ll either call someone I used before, or turn to Google.

2.   If I need something very complex and very reliant on the person supplying it, e.g.  Interior design, or a management consultant, then I will turn to people I trust, who can make recommendations, but the recommendation will only be as strong as the trust attached to it. Again the chances are not good , though admittedly better, that I will turn to my networking for a supplier.

3.  The 60 or so people I know though networking are only likely to contain one or two potential clients, unless I’m an accountant, marketer, or lawyer  etc and plain mathematics would tell any sensible person that it is never gong to produce much of value for me. Above all, it is never going to produce anything proportionate to the time put in.

What do Soviralnetbusworks offer that might be different

The bits we have discussed so far are networking, but of course there is more to soviralnetbusworks than networking.   When Trout and Reis announced “marketing “ to us, they made a few hints at an aspect of human behaviour which back then, they had very little influence over.  The need to “be part of a gang”, to “ conform”, to “be accepted”.  Good marketers have always known how to give the impression that “all the in crowd are wearing this fragrance” or “ hanging around on social networks”, but in the past the ability to influence this stopped at traditional advertising.

Facebook, Linkedin and especially Twitter have begun to provide a new type of influencer. It shortens the message to almost subliminal levels and delivers it like hail stones. The result is that users are bombarded with a sense of what “the gang” is doing and thinking  and it provides powerful potential to really influence huge volumes of people to blindly go where you want to send them.

The best parallel in the natural world is a flock of starlings in Northern Europe doing acrobatics in the sky before settling in for the evening.  They gesture to each other and in an instance either conform or influence their surrounding group. Quickly the group automatically selects a few who seem to be more influential via the timing or style of their gestures, who knows and the whole flock attempts to ape them as they free fly around the evening sky creating incredible shapes and patterns. 

Learning how to influence the social scene in the same way will undoubtedly deliver massive dividends for savvy marketers going forward, but just like TV advertising quickly ran into traffic problems, so too will this format. What we should be doing is looking  for the next big thing.

What do they have in common? And what is different?

Marketing and selling is first of all a debate in itself that often gets heated.  My own favourite take having spent a lot of time close to direct marketing is that marketing is predominantly about generating enquiries and creating the right environment in which to generate enquiries. Where I disagree  with some traditionalists is that I don’t believe you should do it if you can’t measure it.

Marketing and sales is there to generate potential leads, generate leads from those, qualify the leads, build and maintain relationships and convert some leads into orders in sufficient numbers to run a profitable business. How well you do this affects the cost and value of your product as much as anything else does and has a direct impact on customer experience.

The order in which I described this is not all that important, because in truth things happen in all kinds of orders in the real world, but generally, all of the various switches have been pushed before you end up with a customer.

In a social networking environment, the trust building may start the ball rolling and the product enquiry come later, in the traditional environment the  product enquiry may come first, or in between.

People like CRM vendors often have a blind spot about process and struggle to see how things can wander safely and securely via their own paths and yet arrive in the same place. This is just a human failing and nothing more and they shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with how people work.

There have always been weak sales people often described as the “ personality salesman” who believes that his amazing charm is all that matters and pays no attention to the product, the customers need etc.  There is also the “technical salesman” who thinks that all that matters is features and benefits and mathematics and fails to consider the customer’s need to trust him and the supplier and the emotional drivers.
 Neither of these is typical, but both failings are very noticeable in the flawed theory often put forward by networking gurus and ecommerce gurus.

What the internet has changed forever about marketing and selling is that it allows the sales process to begin much earlier and it greatly extends the “Tyre Kicking” phase.

When a new customer enters your showroom now, he has kicked your tryes many times, talked to your friends and knows you intimately. He has downloaded all the datasheets and knows the products as well as you do. He may well have talked to previous users or even your previous customers.  This process goes on all the time and all happens earlier in the buying process than where we used to begin when Trout and Reis were teaching us their tricks.

The big mistakes you can make are:

  1. To assume every tyre kicker is a potential customer and pounce on him. Most will run away and never return.
  2. To ignore the need to support this tyre kicking process sufficiently to be on his list of maybes when he is ready to talk business.
  3. Hang around the car lot waiting for tyre kickers instead of focusing on the ones who are ready to buy, or the ones who did and need support

 

What can shrewd marketers learn from traditional marketing to make their networking more productive?

What is critical going forward is to understand the importance of the  website,  social networking and traditional marketing and how they interact, how they  satisfy tyre kicking, attract a halo of  interested parties, build a funnel of leads, qualify leads, build relationships, support the buying process and generate orders without making your product too expensive to be saleable.

It is vital to apportion the right amount of time and financial investment at each level so as not to put your self out of business.
 A typical example of getting this wrong is spending vast sums on website traffic only to find that they don’t buy anything. Why?  Because they are not at that stage yet.  
Better to use different search terms and target people who have done their tyre kicking and want a better deal. Positioning is still everything. The rues have not changed, just the tools.

  1. The next time you are drawing your sales funnel, or configuring your CRM, add another slice 50 times wider than the biggest one. In here you will put all the” tyre kicking, just looking, maybe some day” people. The ones you’ve been networking with go in here too.
  2. Create a manageable strategy to understand the information and contact needs of this big slice and provide it with minimal effort and expense
  3. Test and establish a way to qualify your people from the tyre kicking slice into the lead slice and back out again without losing them altogether.  This upper slice becomes an ecosystem like the halo over a glass of water. And you need an inexpensive way to keep it in place and growing.

 

Coming next:

 

How can Soviralnetbusworks become a key part of the marketing mix as opposed to an alternative lifestyle?

 

What is the right strategy for me?

November 6, 2009

Communication for project managers

Filed under: Organisational change, communication skills, management skills, project management, soft skills — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 3:11 pm
Communication code scheme

Image via Wikipedia

Introduction to the series.

This series was inspired by the growing concerns expressed by project managers about the demands being placed on them to be communicators, ambassadors, PR experts and even Marketers as they attempt to deliver complex change projects into organisations, especially in the IT field but not exclusively. 
Whether you are moving 1000 people to a new location or asking them to stop doing things the way they do and trust you that a new system will work better, the challenge has been raised and if you are not equipped to meet it your project stands a poor chance of succeeding.

 About the author   
Before you even consider communication with any audience from one person to 100 million people, you need to first gain their respect and trust. If you don’t, why should they listen to you.
Just like you they are bombarded with messages all day every day and they only have time to listen to a choice few that come from trusted sources , that gain their attention and arouse their interest.
Gain  their respect.
Don’t assume that these people know who you are and respect your knowhow, or your authority as the case may be. If you are sent by the CEO, then tell them up front and try to get some demonstration of this from the CEO. If you are offering them expertise, then tell them about your skills and background so that they can judge it for themselves.

Gain their trust

Trust is the most important part of communication by a long shot. Respect and trust are related, but not the same. You can win respect through winning trust, but not necessarily the other way around.
If I am to interrupt my busy day to listen to what you have to say, I need to feel I can trust it.
The best way to win trust is to genuinely be interested and concerned about the other person or the audience. You can’t fake this, unless you have shared experiences and shared fears, hopes, or aspirations, then you will struggle to be convincing. Unless you already have this shared experience, then the simple and the only way to achieve it is to clear your mind of all preconceptions and start listening, start asking questions, questioning the answers and listening with every fibre.
The more you listen, the more you will learn. The strange thing about listening is that not only do you learn a lot, but you start to make a lot of friends effortlessly.

What  you are listening for 

First what you are not listening for, you are definitely not listening for hooks to  let you push your story down their necks. You should be listening to what they are saying at face value. You should also be listening for the unsaid things, the little gaps in the logic and the things left for you to imply. These latter are the things you need to question to make sure you get the truth. If you are a walkover and you get it wrong, you won’t win much respect.

Tip.
Be truthful. If you don’t agree say so. This way you will still find many that agree and others that make allowance, you might even learn something.  If you are false, you will be caught out and lose all credibility.

You are also listening for communication styles the way they express ideas, the vocabulary they use, any analogies they use when discussing the issues and the general attitudes that prevail in that audience to prepare you for how to word your communications. More about this later.

You are listening for differing groups in your audience, I.E different perspectives or different ways of framing the same thing. E.G. Board directors probably have a very different viewpoint on a shop floor issue than the blue collar workers do. Later you will need this knowledge when we come to segmentation.

You are also listening for their motivations, you want to know what would be the thing that would make them most enthusiastic and what would be least motivating to be able to offer to them.

You are also listening for indicators of who their influencers are, who else do they listen to and trust and why. It may be Unions, it may be certain newspapers or magazines, or a TV show. Knowing this will help you to communicate effectively with them.

Listening is a learned skill and only practice will perfect it, it ,may also be a bit of a change for som people, I promise you that if you will try it out for a week, with no motive other than to see what happens, you will never regret it.

 If you are not registered, Regisrer Now to download a free paper [download#1]
 

 

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October 3, 2009

Developing as a manager involves choosing between tips that are often polar opposites

Filed under: management skills, project management, soft skills — admin @ 12:20 pm

Let me explain:

 Polar opposites:

  1.  
    1.  Perseverance is imperative, only he who is willing to persevere in the face of adversity will achieve anything worthwhile
    2. The definition of madness is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.

How do you decide whether are inspired or mad?

Who do you trust to tell you?

Do you really want to know?

 

My view:  Succeed and you are a genius, fail and you are mad, but whatever you do, do with style and passion.

   

    1. She who fails to plan plans to fail.
    2. She who is most flexible will always win through  in the end

Which is your weakness, planning to the nth degree and following your plan stubbornly at all costs, or playing it by ear, because you don’t have time for planning?

 

My view:  Planning is an essential skill, but every minute spent planning on the basis of untried assumptions, is a minute you could have spent either getting on with it, or testing the assumptions.

  

  1.  
    1. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer
    2. Build on strengths, not on weaknesses

Is everyone out to get you? Are you the guy who they pick on? Or do you find friends everywhere you go? Are you a soft touch? Or a ball breaker?

 

My view: It takes two to tango and that includes falling out. I recognise that sometimes you have to be wary, but it is better to play the ball than the man.  Keep it professional.  If you have an unpopular job to do, you can’t expect to be popular and most projects will adversely affect somebody’s comfort.
Focusing on the benefit, while not ignoring the casualties, or apologising for them either  maintains balance, while good planning and momentum will usually dissuade the objectors in the end.

 

  1.  
    1. Vision is the quality that makes great managers
    2. Attention to detail is the mark of a true professional

Do you live in the high trees, or do you spend your time grubbing about in the undergrowth.  Are you the guy who can’t wait to run a spell check, o r are you forever re-reading and improving till you rarely go home before seven and you are always behind?

 

My view:  The real skill  lies in the ability to Chunk up and chunk down in your thinking. It is a learned skill that takes discipline, but you have to know when to climb a tree and get a better view and when to crawl carefully through the undergrowth.  Most imprtantly you need an instinct for “Fit for purpose”

July 2, 2009

Planning for project managers.

Filed under: Systems, management skills, product development, project management — Tags: , , — admin @ 2:40 pm

How important is planning?

Planning is critical. Without planning there is little chance that you can every complete your project, let alone complete it on time.

 The act of preparing a plan, if done correctly, will uncover the issues and risks, provide the bulk of key data for your estimation efforts, provide a clear view of what resource is needed when and lots more.

 It will also help to discover the dependencies that may exist with other projects and activities.
Once prepared, the plan gives the team a better view of how their efforts will come together and points out the need for communication in critical areas.

 

How important is the plan?

Much less important than the act of planning, but still very important. The reason I say this, is because:

1)  It is rare to be able to complete a first draft plan and then not have to make any adjustments.
Most plans develop as they go along and reach a baseline when well into the project timeline.
The most obvious examples of this are projects that involve investigating a problem designing a solution and then finding suppliers to deliver it.
You can allow extra time at the start in the hope that it is definitely too much , but even then, the chances are that you will end up adjusting your plan.

2) Risks and opportunities are a part of every project plan. Sometimes risks come to fruition and they affect the plan profoundly, sometimes opportunities come along that are either too good to miss and causes change of requirements, or  reveal a cheaper, or faster way to get it completed.

In either case, the initial plan will have changed. To live in denial of this as many commentators on project management still do, is a huge mistake and will always be counterproductive.

E.G. If you become so obsessed with meeting a specific date that you are prepared to pare away key features, there is a strong likelihood that the project will fail entirely. The answer is to treat the plan as a guideline and treat planning as an ongoing task.

I recently had this same discussion with a group of seasoned Venture Capitalists and their view was this: 
They would never dream of setting out without a plan, but once they had it in place, they may as well tear it up, because it had already delivered most of it’s value and form here on in, it was more about managing the risks and spotting the opportunities.
They were unanimous in the view that to slavishly stick to that plan would be suicide virtually every time.

Starting a new venture is much more volatile than starting a project, but it is also higher pressure with greater risks and a lot more to lose.  They don’t actually tear up the plan of course, they adjust it and maintain it, but the discussion served to get their point across that management is about managing and adapting on a daily basis, not stubbornly following a plan regardless.
Managing a project should be driven by the business case in the same way that a new venture is driven by reaching a profitable trading position at some point.

Critical also is the acceptance that like a start-up, many good projects are based on a strong hunch and a bit of a gamble for a wothwhile prize. This is enterprise nd without there would be no paydays.  project managers haven’t earned indemnity from this either. 

Features – Deadlines -Budgets – ROI

Here’s where it all happens.  A project will have a goal and that goal will usually be a financial one though success is not always measured in financial terms.
For the sake of this example I will assume that the project is a cost cutting exercise with a specific financial aim. Right at the beginning, the same ground rules should have been laid down such as;

  • What saving are we aiming for?  
  • What investment are we willing to make?
  • What is the maximum our budget can rise to, or the minimum our savings can drop to.?

This latter question is best answered in terms of ROI and in fact, in most commercial organisations the answer will be worked out on the basis of how much ROI exceeds  ”Cost of Capital” in order to qualify the project as “best use of capital”. The critical thing is that it is agreed in advanced and set up as he target.

Once this understanding is in place and the variances have been explored and allowed for, the business case should clearly show the expected returns and the tolerances that are allowable.

The project now has an ambitious goal (maximum realistic returns) and realistic allowable variances. The importance of these variances is not to make the project management team relax, but to assure the sponsors that their investment is relatively safe. Projects set up this way rarely fail.

MSF, the Microsoft flavour of project management introduces a very useful concept known as the project triangle. It is a simple triangle with the three corners being occupied by Features – Resources – Time.project triangle

The significance of the triangle will be obvious to any mathematicians reading in that only one corner of a triangle can be fixed unless you want all three to be immovable.
This is why the prioritisation of concerns is a valuable part of stakeholder alignment. If stakeholders are allowed to follow their natural instincts and demand that all three corners are fixed (two fixed corners means the same thing) then there is no room for the project management team to steer the project out of trouble.

A realistically aligned project will choose one of  Time, Features or Resources to set in stone and the other two will remain free to move.  This way, if time is fixed, then a PM can choose between increasing resources, or decreasing features in order to hit the target (ROI). The decision making process can also be agreed in advance.

This example is one of the simpler ones, but it is indicative of the ills that beset many projects right at the beginning and rob them of any real chance of succeeding, or being seen to succeed.

Defining the scope/budget/resources

Once again, with the ROI in mind and the statement in the business case that based on initial studies, there is a strong likelihood of success, the task now arises to define in more detail the features required to deliver the expected benefits.

Having defined the features, accurate costing has to be worked out on the basis of supplier estimates, internal efforts and other costs, with adjustments for risk, all of which will rely on your emerging plan.
 Another sanity check at the end of this planning phase should check whether  the cost and time estimates are still within the constraints initially set for the project and whether it has a healthy amount of slack remaining to see it through to a likely successful completion.

This exercise of working up plans from draft to more detail as the work progresses from an outline business case through to a detailed contract with suppliers and a detailed plan of implementation with all the appropriate slack allowances  and a rigorous risk assessment will often take up half of the lifecycle of the project, or even more and some projects will be abandoned when it becomes obvious that there is little likelihood of success.

 The number of “stage gates” (sanity checks) should be agreed at the start on the basis of how well known the territory is and how volatile the estimation is likely to be.

The illusion that a project board can put some dates (when we’d like it done) and amounts(how much we’d like to spend) on an A4 sheet at the beginning of the exercise and that perhaps a year or more later, a project team will deliver exactly what was asked for on that sheet, within exactly that amount and on that date is really a surprising error of judgement, but it still happens and contributes strongly to the list of project failures that appear on the Standish report and other investigations.

 

How to go about project planning

Planning should always be done by starting at a very high and general level, involving experienced big picture thinkers and applying a sanity check before then drilling down not too far to the next level  detaiil to repeat the exercise.
Planning should always resist the temptation to go into great depth in one specific area while remaining at a high level on others with one exception.

If there are unknowns, e.g new concepts that might not work, then proof of concept should be carried out as soon as possible to avoid having to abandon the project or change tack after a great deal of money gas already been spent

 

Plans should not be in extreme detail a long way in advance, because the likelihood is that when that time draws closer you will find yourself redrawing them and the effort has been wasted.  As planning continues to drill down, a plan should be retained for each level of detail and when the detail highlights an error in the high level plan, as it frequently will, then the high level plan should be adjusted.

 

The commonest method of estimation to begin with is to break the project down into products.
These products can in turn be broken down further until they reach a level whereby they can be more easily estimated and planned and later assigned to teams.

Out of this comes a product flow diagram that describes the order , if any, in which these products must be completed in order to take account of interdependencies.

Calculating critical paths ( the longest path you can follow) through the products and then amongst the products, the project manager can get a much closer view of the true schedule of the project.

Using PERT to make a high level allowance for uncertainty adds a further level of sanity check to the emerging plan.

Some of the issues that commonly affect project plans drawn by the unwary include :

1. The calendar is not taken into account when calculating for tasks in the plan, e.g seasonal breaks, Summer holidays and other disruptions that happen every year.  Key personnel  disappear and dependencies become critical.
Make sure you discuss each team members responsibilities and schedule with them and get agreements.

2. Suppliers work to their own schedules and regardless of what they agree,  they will place commercial concerns first and may not follow your plan.
Ask them for their plan and question to satisfy yourself that it is thought through. If you  lead, or take part in the contract negotiations, try to place some extra responsibility on them to deliver on time, or warn you in advance.

3. Estimates from technical people are accepted at face value and in reality they are vastly underestimated 80% of the time.
Get second and third opinions, look at records of old projects and as a minimum double the estimates from the best people and use factors as high as five for others.

4.  There’s gaps between what the supplier delivers and what the internal team have allowed for.
e.g. Inexperienced people might assume that a system can arrive, be plugged in and start testing.
Clear acceptance criteria may not exist and there may be problems agreeing acceptance.
Cut over from an old system to a new one may not be catered for.
 This list can grow quickly. If you are not an experienced systems person make sure that there is one in charge of this part of the plan.

5. There may be several suppliers and communication between them may be less than ideal. Often this situation leads to gaps where nobody is responsible and the work grinds to a halt, or even enters dispute , or litigation.

Make sure you hold joint planning meetings and get sign-off to theses joint plans

6. Beware Johari’s window. What you don’t know you know is a terrible waste, so consult and consult again. What you don’t know you don’t know will come back to haunt you, so involve everybody in risk management sessions and try to be ahead of the game, have sufficient slack and keep stakeholders informed of the true position.

7. Over ambitious, or over confident plans create a sense of expectation amongst stakeholders that changes to discontent when the plan slips. Perfectly good projects are often deemed poor projects as a result of this very mistake.

Take the time to estimate risk realistically and maintain realistic slack for the high risk areas of the project.

 

So in summary:

1. Planning is critical and underpins everything, but it is an ongoing everyday task, not a game of snakes and ladders.

2. Managing projects is primarily about handling and working with uncertainty to remain within agreed, acceptable boundaries, not shooting a silver bullet at a precise point.

3. Planning for well known items is easy, beware what you don’t know, this is where you will get caught out.

4. Risk and opportunity go hand in hand, avoiding risk is no more important than spotting opportunity , but it requires an open mind and a fluid approach to planning.

5. Start with an achievable goal, make sure it is well understood and shared  and keep it in front of mind at all times.

June 16, 2009

Programmes are the reason so many projects are deemed to have failed.

Filed under: management skills, product development, project management — Tags: , , , — admin @ 12:28 pm

Build a dungheap and the insects will come

I just left a meeting where we discussed a large and complex programme of work and my mind kept going back to recent discussions about why projects fail. We have been talking about project managers who stay in the office playing with gantts and charts and PMs who know nothing about their subject matter, but see themselves as traffic coordinators. These are real concerns and they are at epidemic level at least and need to be discussed and resolved.

Take one step back from this discussion,however and place yourself in the average programme office.

If the Project manager rarely sees the battlefield, and spends his time constructing fantasy plans without ever checking with reality and assuming that things will stay the same, then imagine how far removed the average programme manager is.
Today I watched just such a Programme manager going through a programme plan and showing the position of each project and of each tranche and giving a thoroughly convincing performance, but based on a few conversations with project managers before I went in, things were not at all like the programme manager’s presentation suggested. Not only was he highly removed from the truth about the various projects, the truth of which was obscured behind vague and even pointless KPIs, but he had no idea of the true situation within any of these projects. One project had reached it’s milestone just ahead of the presentation by launching something totally flawed in the knowledge that it would not be found out for a while and if they hadn’t fixed it in the meantime they would deal with it then and feign ignorance of it. The KPI was declaring completion, not passing though any realistic test of completion.

How can you risk manage a programme without total honesty and a powerful beam of light?

I dread to think of the consequences for his programme of a key project on the critical path getting into serious trouble. If he is measuring the programme with this type of metrics and this lack of control, what chance is there of coming anywhere close to success?
As it happens that project is a critical one and it can stop the entire programme., it should be the focus of major attention until it is out of trouble or the whole thing is abandoned.

There is no difference between this handling of projects and programmes and the commercial practices of reporting false profits to keep shareholders happy and  keep the capital flowing your way.  We have created the conditions for failure and it will continue to happen regularly just as a pile of compost left in the garden will attract plant life.
Is there a realistic answer on either front? I will have to think about this one.

One note in my notebook is quite revealing, no member of the board was present to learn how things were going.

 

 

May 17, 2009

Whose fault is it anyway?

Filed under: management skills, project management — Tags: , , , — admin @ 1:04 pm

 

IT investment for the smaller business
Why the Smaller business holds all the cards
Where has alll the money gone
Requirements gathering the first big mistake
Contract negotiation and on we go
Whose fault is it anyhow ?

 

23% of European projects cancelled, more than half overran by 50% or more.

When projects grow to any size, they invariably lose sight of the basics and especially they lose sight of the goals.

In the above study the authors uncovered weaknesses that have reached epidemic proportions, i.e

  •  inability to distinguish the critical success factors from Prince 2 speak ( total faith in methodology alone).
  •  Wrong KPIs from day one.  Inability to define and agree requirements. 
  •  Poor programme and business management leading to people believing they have done well when in fact they have missed the target completely, or that they are failing when in fact they are performing well.
  • Poor estimating of cost and time leading to inaccurate plans and poor management failing to follow good plans.
  • The wrong person in charge.
  • The wrong reason for starting in the first place. 
  •  Bad decisions made for the wrong reasons.
  • Unspoken political issues that were well known from the start, but could not be spoken of openly.

The most common failings are at the early stage and they are failings to understand:

1. Failing to understand what is best for the client. It doesn’t matter who is responsible for identifying and solving the problem, client or trusted adviser.  Things will go badly for both sides of the relationship unless it is done well before proceeding to delivery phase.

The challenges here are well understood, new technology in anything from fighter planes to productivity software is a challenge to understand, explain, evaluate, risk manage and decide on.
When it comes to an independent adviser this can be a little easier, but when the adviser is the supplier then it is more difficult to evaluate the accuracy of the material before making decisions. One of the biggest root causes of failing and vastly underperforming projects is poor choice of solution either through misunderstanding the problem, the operating climate, or the proposed solution.

The client has to take responsibility here, there is no alternative.

2. Understanding the problem and knowing what solution is chosen, but not understanding the macro and micro detail of exactly how the solution delivers and whether it really will fit in, switch on and work well enough to deliver on the promise.

Let’s say our customer is solving a scheduling problem and has agreed to invest in an automated scheduling solution. At this point it is hard to fault the logic. This is macro level. Now at Micro level our customer will have discussed certain things like how it interfaces with his ERP system and details like how it chooses who to send a particular emergency to.  All the big stuff and all the sexy stuff tends to get discussed.  What nobody has looked into is whether this system can deal with the fact there are many jobs where a dozen or more customers have to be visited at once in close proximity ( a warden controlled environment for the elderly is just one case).  This is the type of thing that is completely missed out on and grinds everything to a halt at some point, sometimes to the extent of scrapping everything and starting again, but more often by adding to the time and budget estimates, or dragging down the project slowly by reducing the benefits and spoiling the expected return.

3. Understanding the problem and the solution, but failing to understand the ambient climate that affects whether an expected outcome can be reliably predicted, or whether a more conservative approach is required, or perhaps and “all-in” gamble when there is nothing to lose and all to gain. Certainly there is a marked difference between the decisions being made today and those being made prior to August 2008.  I saw EDI solutions implemented at enormous cost at a time when a web page with HTTPS could have solved the same problem.

These three aspects are just small but very important reasons why projects will continue to struggle until they are taken more seriously.

Working relationships have to be enabled and supported, or they will hover close to litigation.

There are no big companies, just people who work at them and most decisions are based at some level on selfish motives. More often than not a supplier’s representative has to meet certain targets and will play the game to defend his margins.

In order to meet you half way he has to feel very confident that you can be trusted and he has to be motivated by gain. Don’t read this wrong, the gain I am referring to is the gain that results from satisfying his superiors, or exceeding their expectations, the gain for a customer representative is very similar though it will often be motivated more strongly by personal risk aversion.  Few organisations reward risk taking and even fewer forgive the risks that mature.

Easy solutions with negative undertones

The easy solution for the sales director, or suppliers project manager is to record what you ask for, make sure it is sufficiently close to what they are offering to keep them on a safe legal footing and then proceed in the knowledge that whenever it goes a little wrong, they will be very sympathetic and give you a bit of a discount on the extra work you needed. This strategy places all the risk on the customer and the further in the he commits the business, the less likely he will be to walk away and admit defeat. This strategy has developed into an art called “contract re-negotiation” that has begun to appear on CVs.

The easy solution for the customer project manager is to ignore the details and make it appear that he is placing all the responsibility for detail on the supplier. Then when it goes wrong they will wrangle and resolve it and he will continue to maintain his innocence and to castigate the supplier.

 

The correct solution is to negotiate the contract correctly from a position of enlightenment and to identify and spread the risk evenlySimplest case

The easy solution for the customer is to hire a red hot BA to document in great detail every aspect of the required solution, ask every question that needs to be answered and double check the fit with the business requirement, business strategy, prevailing conditions.  Having signed this off with business stakeholders, the risk has now been spread evenly and fairly.

The business makes a business decision and takes the strategic risks, the supplier works to a precise specification and prices the job accurately to leave an appropriate margin, the delivery team have only to concern themselves with identifying the risks that remain managing them attending to dependencies and keeping everything on track.
Any unexpected issues are easily categorised as such and there is a clear path for handling them appropriately.

More complex case

Many projects carry with them an element of innovation, this is the stuff of progress and it is critical not to smother it, but to do it well requires a marriage, or at least a fairly resilient affair between the business and the technology partner.

The answer is not surprisingly a combination of the two previous approaches. First of all a BA must do the job of defining the part of the project that is well understood in terms of business need and the supplier must bid for this as though it were the whole project, initially at estimate level.  The areas requiring innovation and carrying higher risk must be evaluated and risk managed so that a maximum cost and a likely cost can be established and the risk level can be well understood.

Once this is done an approach is defined that tackles the biggest impact risks as early as possible in order to allow an early exit if things go wrong.  Regular stage gates are planned so that there are opportunities to revise risk and cut losses early.  Managing the risk in this way makes this aspect of the project less likely to fail catastrophically and brings it out in the open early.  Working relationships tend to prosper in this type of environment and good relationships deliver good outcomes.

Risk management is like charity, it must start at home.

The first and by far the greatest risk to every project is the culture of the organisation.  As this report supports, many project managers turn a blind eye to political situations that can’t be discussed and proceed in the hope that all will be well.  Some of these situations include: mixed feelings in the boardroom and tripwires around every corner, Gadget freaks in the senior management who want to add on stuff they would like to play with.  Management who shoot the messenger, but can easily be fooled. People who get involved with the suppliers or their staff socially and undermine the project team.  There are many more examples of very serious risks that remain unspoken, but are responsible for a great many failures.

 

 

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April 15, 2009

Contract negotiation and on we go

Filed under: Systems, management skills, project management, soft skills — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 11:20 am

Previous installments

IT investment for the smaller business
Why the Smaller business holds all the cards
Where has alll the money gone
Requirements gathering the first big mistake

A shock for the project manager

In the last instalment we discussed the way in which a vendor had been chosen that near total disregard for the goals of the project in the course of making that decision. Now we will look at what happened after the decision was made.
The next agenda item directly after awarding the contract was to negotiate and agree details and on this occasion it was lead by the vendor’s legal team and the sales rep.  The atmosphere was very warm and jovial and nothing was too much trouble in the vendor’s quest to make the new customer happy.

So far so good

The contract was agreed just after lunch on day two and everyone went away with a sense of achievement. 
Deliverables were carefully defined and the acceptance criteria was very forgiving. It would have been clear to any pro that there was a lot of stuff not mentioned that would need to be done and paid for, but it was not brought up.  The bulk of the cost was loaded up front with a year’s licenses to be paid for immediately and support to begin charging on contracted release day.
There was an SLA, but it gave no guarantees of times to fix issues, only times to address them. The rate for professional services was a little steep at £1400 a day but it seemed academic.
The real problem with this contract was that it never referenced the now academic requirements documentation (In any case it was pretty useless) and
the contract revolves entirely around delivery of a certain feature set as described by the vendor in features language, not in business need language.
Success criteria is defined as delivering this feature set by a given date and to a given cost
At this point we have two teams involved; a project team that is now providing services to the vendor to get the job done and a vendor with the goal of delivering the described features and getting paid.   Our initial problem of lack of experience and know-how in the sales and marketing teams has never been addressed and is not on anybodies radar and there is nothing anywhere, either spoken or written to say that delivery of this feature set will solve the defined problems I.E. the business case has been forgotten. In fact the thing that really swayed the decion on which vendor to use was a very sexy system that lets  the user record telephone conversations and the hardware to make this work pushed up the cost.   
Here’s the shock for the project manager.
The sales rep is now cosy with another potential client and the project manager is now dealing with the professional services team tasked with delivering the project to  tight budgets.   Now he’s dealing with a real project manager and a hard nosed business man who survives by taking no prisoners and earns bonus by growing the contract value through extras. He is a past master at dealing out the rope and charging to reel it back in and he’s seen all the snivelling before. He is the essence of tact and diplomacy but his hand is firmly in the project managers pocket.

The roller coaster

Within two weeks of contract completion, the mood has turned frostier and it is clear that this is not precisely what the project manager had expected and hoped for.  Everyone is now locked into a roller coaster of milestones and budgets and the reason for it all is completely forgotten. That was handled in phase one, wasn’t it?  You get on in the corporate world by meeting milestones, not by delivering results and certainly not by making waves.

We are where we are

We are now on ride that won’t slow down until this thing, whatever it is going to look like, is delivered and we can start the job of making it work and getting people to use it so we don’t lose face.
Nobody who suspects the truth, if such a person exists, has the seniority or the courage to step out of the line shout horses@”!* and nobody with the authority or the presence to do something has any idea that things are not what they seem.

 In the next installment we will look at the the end game

About the author

January 23, 2009

Is there still a case for IT strategic planning?

Filed under: Organisational change, Strategic thinking, feasibility study, management skills — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 6:19 pm

 The earth is flat in any case

Unless you’ve been asleep, in denial or on medication, you will have noticed, at some level at least, that in the last few months the key assumptions underlying our post industrial survival have been proven flat wrong.

To put that in content, the earth is not round but flat and the universe is merely mirror images of the earth reflected on a layer of slightly opaque gasses. The landing on the moon happened in a closed off section of MGM and hamburgers are good for you.

It no longer matters how much we borrow because we probably won’t be around to pay it back, only nobody will lend it of course because they are keeping it to line their pyramids with.

What’s the point in getting up?

You could easily be pardoned for asking the question and I can see some beginning to think like that.
That, in truth is what recession really is.
An end to economic growth is no big deal, we probably couldn’t survive without taking the odd breather. The bad bit is when sensible people suddenly decide that it’s not worth bothering, then we all suffer and what was a diet quickly becomes bulimia.
Read on and I will convince you that there bigger opportunities than ever, they just need a different approach

So how do you build a business case for IT investment and sell it to the board?

Realism
If you want to be taken seriously, you can’t base any investment on predictions of returning to normal in a few months or pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
You must recognise it and spell it out in terms of a clearly risk managed approach.
It’s unlikely that you are in a business where you can afford to make risky investments with long payback periods, so you need ROI fast, or even faster and you must prove that your eye is on the ball.

Prudence
Getting the financials right is critical, but that’s not the whole story by a long way, here’s a selected list of other issues in no particular order that are extra important.

· Make sure your initiative addresses the bulls eye in terms of business initiatives, not peripheral or even sort of important, but right up there.

· Make sure this is best deployment of scarce capital.  Remember it is no longer in unlimited supply.

· Time to market is very important and can easily be disguised behind impressive returns. Include timing in this calculation. Limping in a month behind your main rival is a great way to blow your big chance.

· Competitive advantage can be a critical factor that is easily missed. If all your competitors are cutting 20% off cost of sales and your initiative wipes 5% off, you might find the idea is less successful than you had hoped.

· Don’t suggest a major new 22nd century architecture if your goal can be achieved reliably with duct tape and scaffolding. This is about surviving today, not ideas or principals or fancy technology.

A little audacity goes a long way
Take a look at tiny little Porche and compare them to giant GM. Porche are busy taking over VW, to create the third biggest car manufacturer in the world and asking nobody for help, but using the downturn to make it possible.
If you are good at what you do and you can improve costs and capabilities, then watch out for all the leftovers of those overweight beasts that are shedding customers and reputation and be ready to take advantage of the opportunities that a downturn creates. In a ten horse race there are nine opportunities and one risk for the bookmaker. Don’t focus in on the risk and blind yourself to the opportunities.

Outside the box

There’s a great awkward purple elephant sitting on the board table and let’s stop pretending he’s not there.
The GAPE I’m talking about is the contradiction between thinking out of the box and following the strategy, the corporate plan and the processes, those things so beloved of civil servants and Ops directors. Let’s just say it:
How the hell can you be a process man who works to the plan and also think outside the box?

Well of course you can’t, it’s that simple, so you have to come out from behind whatever you are hiding behind and take a chance or two. Be up front about it that acceptance of your new proposal means revision of the agreed strategy and the current plan. That’s why they are there, not as straight jackets.
Delivering benefits on the cheap can upset lots of people, especially some members of the IT department, preferred suppliers and business analysts who have carved out cosy corners for themselves, but if that is the price, then accept it and pay it. Here’s a few examples:

· Be prepared to ignore the Enterprise architecture and do it the cheapest way.

· Be prepared to bypass the developers in the corner and buy something a bit scruffy and poorly documented, but supported from outside the business.

· Be prepared to find a few freelancers in Russia and get it done cheaper.

· Learn about mashups that can deliver the same result as an enterprise bus for a tiny fraction of the cost and get your show on the road.

· Get to know someone who knows about opensource solutions that are a bit ugly in places and awkward to install but are FREE and once you get them working they eat no corn.

· If you don’t know about agile methods, speak to someone who does and consider it for appropriate situations.

· Look for SaaS products that can start delivering returns in days rather than months

· This is a no brainer, but rarely done. Make sure your people know how to get the most out of the systems you already have.

So there is a new strategy after all

Yes there is a strategy for the current climate and I believe it has a valid legacy to take forward into the good times also.
Don’t stop looking for opportunities, but look harder, look outside the box and examine them more closely before committing. That usually requires an external input, but it is well worth it.
Don’t plan for a decade, but for this year, who knows what next year will be like, but this strategy will still be serving you whatever it looks like. That means dumping or revising much of the strategy and plans you are currently strangling yourself with. Do it sooner rather than later and free up your thinking and your energy.
Look for silver linings until it becomes a habit
Remember not to get complacent in the next bull market
 About the author

November 20, 2008

Communication for project managers-teaching skills

Filed under: Organisational change, communication skills, management skills, project management, soft skills — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 4:26 pm
Communication major dimensions scheme

Image via Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

Part two -Get your point accross

Read Part one

Basic teaching skills

I use the word teaching because there is really no difference between teaching/learning and communication of any other sort.  Your role is to help people understand the concepts you are communicating and to see the world in the same way that you want them to and to learn to see it the way they do in order to improve your ability to communicate with them.
Filters

People develop immunity to certain words and phrases and styles of communication.  E.G. ” Closing down sale” is unlikely to conjure up images of a shop about to close and selling premium stock very cheap.  If you are hoping to convince wealthy shoppers to read your message, this is probably not the way to go.
Much like a spammer who avoids certain words that get picked up by spam filters, you need to carefully craft your messages so that they are not rejected instantly as a result of being associated with boring messages that never are interesting or official stuff that nobody ever reads.

Communication styles

 Try to aim your communication style so that it appeals to everyone. Your readers or listeners will use different styles to deal with your messages. Some imagine pictures, other listen to the message and yet others concentrate on the feelings it engenders. You need to try and ensure that it meets the needs of each type of recipient.

Use analogy to simplify complex messages

Finally you must make maximum use of analogy as a way of explaining complexity to a lay audience.
Compare your ideas to parallel ideas that people will already understand. E.G.  ”A DNS server is just like a dictionary where you can put in a name and get back the correct number. We do this because remembering the names is easier for people, but the numbers are easier for machines.” An example added to this makes it easy to understand and memorable. The more colourful  the example the more memorable.

Use comparison to establish a position

A position means a way you relate me, or my project  to others. I would like you to see me as the Bentley of Project managers. That way I am assuming that you rate the Bentley very highly as a Moto car and by association you would then rate me very highly.

 By taking some time to understand your audience and to plan your communication style and content, you can achieve a great deal more with your communications and make life easier for yourself on all fronts.

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