From the course: Project Management Foundations: Communication
Answer tough questions
- As a project manager, it's inevitable. At some point, a stakeholder is going to ask you a tough question. Your instincts might be to sugar-coat the answer. You might even try to ignore the question. You should fight these instincts. I once worked on a project for a group of schools. The project was behind schedule and one of the stakeholders sat me down and asked, "Why do you think we should fund this project "if the software isn't working?" If this happens to you, try to remember the acronym NIECE. N, never get upset. I, illustrate their question with examples. E, empathize with the stakeholder. C, clarify the question. And E, explain your answer. I'd been working on this project for over a year, so it was difficult to not get defensive. But I didn't get upset. Instead, I asked him to illustrate with some examples. He said he had given a demonstration to a group of customers and the software didn't create student accounts. Using active listening, I tried to get him to clarify the question. So which part of the software wasn't working? Was it just the create student accounts? Try to get very specific illustrations. You'll want to focus on the question and not on the stakeholder. You'd never want to ask something like, "Why do you think the software's not working?" That type of question might make the stakeholder defensive. You just want to make sure that you understand the question. All of your listening should have empathy. Admit to wrongdoing or mistakes. Understand the stakeholder's point of view. Then you'll want to clarify the original question. Are you asking me if we should cancel the project? When you clarify the question, you have a much better sense of what the stakeholder's actually thinking. Remember, his question actually has a positive tilt to it. He's asking why he shouldn't cancel the project. Compare that to, please shut down the project. That type of clarification probably means that your project's already canceled. The final, and perhaps most important part of the NIECE acronym is to explain your answer. When the stakeholder's asking you a question, it's usually because they're going to use your answer with somebody else. So a lot of times when the stakeholder asks you a question, what they're really asking is, give me an answer I can use. So be sure to give them your full thought process. Something like, I don't think we should cancel this project because we decided to develop a software very quickly. We did this because we knew that the customer would make a lot of changes. The downside to delivering it quickly is that we'll spend more time debugging. So after you explain your answer, you might want to make some suggestions on how to improve the process. The stakeholder for the schools decided not to cancel the project. He even used my illustrations to explain to the other schools the issue at the next demonstration. Focusing on the question really improved our communication.
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