Managing Expectations

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about managing stakeholders' expectations. What is the importance of properly managing expectations? What is the relationship of them with the project's scope and risk management?

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today, like to share with you some thoughts around Expectations management, why he does is so important to manage the Expectations of all the stakeholders. And I know that we have talked many, many times about people management, leadership and all that, but right now I want just to address why we need to address clearly the expectations of all stakeholders. First, when you start projects You to understand clearly what is the expectations from the project in most of the time, before you start a project, you try to sell the project mint to get executive sponsorship and to engage all stakeholders.

And sometimes when you do this, you raise Expectations and you raise or not in a healthy way. You raise these expectations in a very dangerous way, because everybody started to support them because you were telling them that you will solve all the problems. But to when the problems really begin during the execution of the project, then you are in trouble. It's like a rollercoaster. You go up so fast, but you go down incredibly fast. So we, it's very, very important that you create a solid Expectations on your projects and something that you can really are chive on the other site.

A lot of people say, no, I need to reduce expectations because if I reduce Expectations, then I will have less risk a yes, that's right. You'll have less risk F your project goals forward. What is the problem? Because he, we do not have too much Expectations then it's very, very hard. The approved you to do the product, because you say, look, I'm doing this project. I don't know if I'll solve the problem. I don't know if I, where there's this. I don't know if I did it on time.

I let you fall will spend the budget to you are given to me. So Ben, probably your major is stakeholders and the sponsor's will say, Oh, look, my friend, I will not give you the assets to do the project. I would not give you the right to do the project because it's so poor. So look at the challenge is to find exactly the right balance between reducing and very low expectations and very high expectations. He was a very high, it's a very easy for you to increase Expectations to sell a project.

But it's very hard to handle when you start a project, because we are expecting so much from you. The other side, if you start with a very low expectations, Dan, and the results can be very good, but the product is that if you start with very low expectations, people, we usually will not see them. The project has something that will be good because they don't have any major expectations on that. Find this right balance is the challenge in, there is no mathematics. There is no model, no formula to do that.

And this is the biggest challenge. It's based on your knowledge, it's basic on your cultural aspects, in the cultural aspects of your organization to set the right lens, to challenge, to give a good news, good Expectations, but to not overwhelm and them like save and a planet. It's one example that I see pretty much often is ERP implementations does enterprise, all this enterprise software and what happened because usually when people are selling this, they're telling all we did this crazy digital shelf, all of the corporate problems and everything, but when it becomes real, it solves a lot of problems, but not all problems because all companies are driven by people.

And if you have people and will always have problems, this is natural, this part of the business. So it's very, very important that you, where there's properly there's Expectations or otherwise you increase the risk of your project and also increase the failure rate of what you're doing. I hope you enjoy this podcast. See you next week with another five minutes PM. Podcast.

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