Build Listening Systems for Project Success

April 4th, 2003 by Hal

Project success depends on team members performing well. Project managers can do their part by developing their listening skills (rather than their persuasion skills). Developing skill at listening takes time and practice. Dr. Rick Brommelje offers a little help each week in The Listening Leader Newsletter. I've reprinted this week's issue as a sample. Give it a try for a few months…subscribe.

Listening-Based Innovation

Continuing success comes from value-creating innovation stimulated by disciplined listening. Occasional surveys are insufficient. Organizations need to build listening systems that capture, summarize, and disseminate the unmet dreams and unfulfilled wants of multiple
customer groups, including existing, prospective, and internal customers (employees).

Listening systems uncover fresh marketplace intelligence, help guide decision making, and nurture creative thinking. Effective listening systems involve both formal and informal methods, conversations with customers, the use of trend data to reveal changing patterns, the
distribution of relevant information to all employees, and active discussion and application of findings in work groups.

Listening leads to learning, which sets the stage for innovation. Innovation is more likely when employees are well informed about the customer, unafraid to try something new, and committed to the organization's success. Charles Schwab uses multiple methods to listen for customers' dreams that often start with the phrase, "I know it's not possible, but I wish….." Schwab's top management travels extensively to interact with customers in informal settings. Branches host monthly customer receptions, and at least once a week in different cities. Schwab holds town meetings to hear employees' ideas, suggestions, and concerns.

Gary Hoover, who has created three innovative businesses (Bookstop, Hoover's Handbooks, and TravelFest) claims that the customers always get what they want. It is just a matter of who gives it to them when. Companies that sustain success continually search for new ways to create value for customers. They choose to lead rather than follow, to act rather than wait, to heed the customer instead of the competitor.

Source: Leading for the Long Term, Leonard Berry, Leader to Leader
© 2003 by Dr. Rick Bommelje. Subscribe

Reduce Project Variability…Start Listening

5R Project Protocol (Proposal)

The Role of Management

Shut Up and Listen

Checking In — About to Become Sport

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2003 at 4:43 pm and is tagged: PM practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Convert this post to a PDF document.

Social Bookmarking

3 Responses to “Build Listening Systems for Project Success”

Claude Emond Says:
April 5th, 2003 at 4:20 pm
it is not a coincidence that one of the 4 cornerstones of agile programming projects, as illustrated by the eXtreme programming philosophy and rules is LISTENING: see http://xp.c2.com/ExtremeProgramming.html

Those 4 cornerstones are Coding, Testing, Listening and Designing. This is what is said about listening:

�You have to learn what the problem is in the first place, then you have to learn what numbers to put in the tests. You probably won’t know this yourself, so you have to get good at listening to clients - users, managers, and business people�

For sure, when project teams use SCRUM approaches, approaches that consist in having 30 minutes meetings to adjust the work EVERY SINGLE DAY, there is a lot of listening going own, not only from the project-team manager/leader but from EVERYONE. Since in Agile, the team accepts to collectively be accountable for the results, listening, but also the whole function of COMMUNICATION, is the business of EVERYBODY. In fact, in a SCRUM setting, those meetings-conversations are at the center of the management process; they are even the whole of the management process in many instances.

I imagine that similar comments apply to the LAST PLANNER System,with which you are more familiar than me. From what I understand, one of its main features implies listening to the last planners (those who do the work) BEFORE we start anything (as opposed to asking for suggestions when it is already too late in the execution of a plan that was developped in isolation and imposed without consultation)

Listening has my vote as a major key success factor of project management. It is even a pre-condition to planning, for without proper listening, your initial planning will only be unshared wishful thinking and, furthermore, you won’t be able to adjust it when the real world confronts you during execution.

Amen
Hal Says:
April 5th, 2003 at 5:14 pm
Well said, Claude. :+:

So much of our attention in project management is on the tangible aspects: contracts, budget, schedules, activities, tasks, materiel, methods, etc. Too often we fail to put the humanness of projects front and center.

How often have we encountered projects in trouble and the team members know what to do to fix it, but those actions are not being taken? Each time I’ve encountered that situation I’ve also run into a project manager who doesn’t listen.

Listening is one of the foundational skills of project managers. Without a high level of competence at listenting projects are doomed to drift. Given the general characterization by wives that husbands don’t listen, anytime we have project managers who are men we have a potential breakdown.

So…for anyone recruiting/selecting project maangers find a way to assess their competence and openness of listening. The success of your projects depends on it.
Eli Robillard Says:
April 24th, 2003 at 6:06 am
Good post. In one of my own I make the case that both listening and taste are the keys to writing useful software. There is art to listening: http://dotnetweblogs.com/ERobillard/Story/4479.aspx

Take care,
Eli.

Comment On This

If you haven't left a comment here before, you will need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.