We need a new logo for the MadeOn business, so we jammed up a worksession to list all the values that MadeOn does and does NOT want to project for its product line. We want a niche and clearly defined customer message. MadeOn wants the logo to portray one or more of those values while still giving it room to expand her product line.

Within an hour, we had what we wanted and we sent the list to Sarah, our logo designer to help her get started on some draft ideas for our review. We got the greenlight that it was sufficient for the designer to get started.

Here's the result of that logo worksession:

In a simple sentence, purpose of product line is to "Protect and nourish the skin effectively with premium ingredients that you can trust and understand so you can get back to your work"

Here are the values that I would like our MadeOn product line to be associated with:
efficient, strong, and powerful
clarity of purpose
understandable ingredients
transparency (we share on youtube what we do, my face and contact info is on the front page, etc)
fresh ingredients
premium ingredients
perishable ingredients
functional
for hard working hands
heals skin, nourishes and protects skin

In counterpart, here are some of the values that I do NOT want our line to be associated with:
not a long shelf life
not a novelty item
not girlie or teenager's lotion
not lacey
not foofy
not a perfumed lotion
not for old ladies
"not your mom's lotion"
not black/white themed
not a "secret" medicine

I was inspired by an excellent article by Robert Bogue on the Tech Republic community site, entitled "Convert Tacit Knowledge into Explicit Knowledge to Ensure Better Application Development"

As knowledge and methods emerge from new technology and circumstances, a lot of know-how is uncovered and assimilated by workers in an intuitive and observational manner through direct experience. In the beginning, there are few written guides and rules that can be referenced to produce the same results that the experienced individuals can produce. From a business perspective, one of the key to cost savings is to find a way to quickly translate the emerging intuitive knowledge from experienced workers to less experienced workers. This is important to producing significant cost savings on large projects.

However translating that intuitive knowledge into new rules is not a necessarily a skill shared by the workers with the most experience. Very often your most experienced Subject Matter Expert has the least ability to map that knowledge into useable rules by others. As a project manager this can be a problem. 

My answer? Decouple the skills: the intuitive knowledge source still resides with the experienced Subject Matter Expert, but the task of eliciting that information and translating it into re-usable rules I give to someone with high-verbal, written, and social interviewing skills.

As Project Manager, that person with the high interviewing skills will often be you.

Socialization is powerful force to influencing behavior. That's a grown-up term to mean that adults also face "peer pressure" in the workplace. This force can be for good or evil.

Sometimes socialization does help to influence behavior toward positive outcomes.

I remember a time when I was mentally sold on wanting to bring clarity to my own communication style, especially via email, but I was hesitant to drastically change as no one else was showing any inclination to better the process. Would this be interpreted as not being a "team player"? The average PM was proud of his pulling weekends and evenings to accomplish work that could have been executed in dramatically less time.

Different communications methods would make all such grunt work obsolete, but would change existing PM roles and structure.

Enter an old colleague for whom I had a lot of respect. I had not been in touch with him for some time and when we caught up again with each other's professional life, he shared with me his updated signature line. Wow! It was a signature line that now systematically included the link to the "5 Sentences" principle. The principle states:

" five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less."

And he was already applying it and not just thinking about it. That's all I needed to push me to change my communication method. That is the power of positive socialization.

Go ye and socialize likewise!

At the beginning of a project, spending one hour offline crafting a well-worded and concise questionnaire saves at least ten hours of talk time. That questionnaire can be used repeatedly as new managers and new resources appear on-and-off the work scene. 

However the questionnaire must be pushed through a web-based survey tool to not lose the advantage by doing redundant conference calls. Once your target audience gets used to the novelty, you will find they will enthusiastically embrace it. Why? Because it allows them to control their own time and push downstream to their subordinates with little or no rework - and it builds an incentive to be swift and efficient as all the time saved becomes theirs. The other advantage is I can compare the answers between reporting managers and across time within the same reporting group. 

Scalability? Definitely. When your peers are begging for a break after ten hours of non-stop meetings, you just push the send button of that well-crafted questionnaire to a 100 more people!

As a Project Manager, I like to ask each group lead to provide me a one-page summary of their overall understanding of the project as far as their role is concerned. I do this for two reasons. One reason is that it provides me confirmation that the group understands what it is getting involved in and therefore won't be caught off guard by lack of resources.The other reason is that I can re-cycle that one-page summary by forwarding it to other groups. Now other interfacing managers can understand the scope and role of that team.

Here's my bonus move: I re-cycle that information again to get general status updates from the group leads as against their original summary expectations. It keeps everything nice and clear and keeps me from being snowed by the details.

When a project needs a specialty tower I've never dealt with before, I like to find out what questions I should be asking. The key to relevance is to ask them from the person who is the expert from that specialty tower.

I ask "Since I'm new to this, what are the types of questions I should be asking others in order to get to you information that makes sense to your group?"

?

Acronyms have a useful role among specialists. They allow quicker and more succinct communications among specialists - think texting for geeks. However that is only useful when those specialists are in the very same narrow field of specialty. If they are not within the same very narrow field, I find that it causes more confusion than necessary.

So, as a good Project Manager, it's my job to decode the acronyms and put them in plain descriptive English for the other specialists. And yes, I sometimes have to put up with the "don't you know anything?!" look, but, hey, that keeps me humble.

It IS a big universe out there!

Ever get a document that's ten pages long, full legalese,and full of wheels within wheels and written as if by a committee? And it could have been expressed in two pages in plain language? When I do, I spend most of my time trying to find the "information" that is buried in the doc. I'm usually too embarrassed to ask the author early on for clarification because surely, I tell myself, I'm smart enough to decipher it.

Ever been guilty of writing one to foist onto your customer that you wouldn't care to read yourself? (I plead the fifth)

If I write the doc in order to communicate a valuable piece of information and then get zero feedback, how could my effort not have been wasted? I then know I failed in my communication. 

The Antidote After the Failure? A short email with 5 bullet summary of what I was really trying to say the first time!

The Triple Constraint Triangle is the Picture of Balance.

I can use it as a beautiful visual summary of the project and a quick way to share the vision.