Manage expectations or How to say no
Tigran Baseyan, a lecturer at the Financial University, told Netology about his experience in the Borjomi corporate startup and expectations management.
How many times after an unsuccessful project I thought: “Now everything will be different, I gained experience. These things I will not do. And I will not take such projects. ” Feel the pain? Do you recognize yourself?
There is such a rubric - share what you learned through experience - with sweat and blood. I will share several techniques for managing expectations that I would have been happy about 8 years ago at the beginning of my IT career.
I’m sure that Jim Carrey’s “Always say yes” picture is to blame. But you and I are adults and we should understand that for a business any answer “yes” is a cost. And even worse, if you can not answer the question "Why yes?" And "How did it happen?"
')
From the dictionary: “Managing expectations - when you give a picture of the world of users,
the customer, the project sponsor, and other stakeholders as closely as possible to the reality, so that the collision with it is as painless as possible. ”
Matching reality, what is it? It's about creating a single "real". That is, the decrease in the difference between expectations and what is happening, which occurs when:
In this article, I will consistently tell about each item and give practical tools that will help resolve the limitations in these areas.
If we reformulate the pains above, then the management of expectations is:
Six months ago, I moved to a corporate startup - and was not ready for the fact that all hypotheses should be tied to a specific goal and formulated by smart. I used to work, relying on my intuition, although she often let me down. And that was one of the most memorable Aha moments.
The most common problem when setting goals is their abstractness:
The other day I spoke with my former colleague, who set himself the goal of “improving the main page of the site.” Like a goal, like a goal, but it’s not very clear what it means to improve, what to do and when, how to measure the result.
To turn an abstract goal into a concrete one, it is convenient to use goal-setting methodologies. There are many, the most simple and popular - SMART.
The technique includes five main characteristics that each goal must meet:
The goal must be specific. Concreteness is a clear understanding of the result to be achieved.
A bad example: “Make the interface better.” In this case, it is unclear what the current interface is bad, what needs to be improved. What is the metric?
A good example: "Increase conversion to target action from 1% to 3%." Such a specific formulation immediately gives an understanding of the scope of work, alternative tasks, for example, what tools to apply.
The goal must be measurable. Each target must have some measure of measurement. With its help, you can understand whether you have achieved the desired result or not.
In the example above, this value is the conversion rates for the landing page. If we talk about other examples, then often we want to go on a diet or go to the gym. But it is not clear how many times you need to go to achieve the goal. Is one time enough or not? Here it would have worked better “To spend 10 trainings in the gym until January 31, 2019”.
The goal must be achievable. Reachability affects motivation. It is not necessary to set very simple goals for yourself, because interest in this case also disappears. But no matter how you like, your brain is unlikely to take seriously the goal of "To be on the moon by February 1, 2019". But the goal of “Publishing an article by February 1, 2019” seems much more achievable and therefore interesting.
The goal must be meaningful to you. Significance of the methodology in SMART - the value of the contribution that will bring the solution to this problem in achieving the strategic goals of the company.
The goal must be limited in time. The goal of “Learning English” will be much less effective than “To pass the TOEFL certification at least 95 points by December 15, 2019”. When a time stamp appears to which you want to get a result, the brain in the offline mode builds a conditional timeline. You understand that for certification you need to learn, for example, 800 words. The brain understands that to do it in 3 days is unrealistic, so you need to make a plan.
Recently heard in one conversation:
- I set a plan for my month on X rubles, I think they can make about 70%.
- What for?
- There are several reasons: first, a bigger plan means the initial one will be easier. Heard about OCD? So this is a cool topic to manage, Google works on it. It is necessary to set KPIs higher so that a person does not perform more than 70 percent.
If you hear such a conversation from the head of the sales department, you can easily imagine that this way he motivates his team to rise and work. But if we talk about IT projects and products, then this approach is inefficient and destructive. First of all, you can read about OCD on the page .
OKR (from the English. Objectives and Key Results - goals and key results) - a method that is used in management to manage projects. Allows you to synchronize team and individual goals and provide effective control over the implementation of the tasks. The OKR method was developed by Intel. After gained distribution in a number of major technology companies, including Google, LinkedIn, Zynga.
In general, the technique to promise / put a higher plan to make a standard is a slippery slope:
I saw another way of setting plans / goals, making them inflated for the team and understated when presented to customers. But the risks in this approach are the same as in the previous presentation. You run the risk of failing to over-plan to lose a team.
The bottom line: make plans that you can actually fulfill and for which you can vouch.
SMART can diagnose and synchronize the start of work on a project by creating a common point - the point of origin. But each has its own speed of movement, therefore, we need tools to synchronize the work.
At the beginning of the article we focused on creating a field for effective communication by setting the right goal. And what about the decision, what should be the goal?
Find out the questions below:
The problem with such statements is the lack of association with the goals and objectives of the team. Thus, the notorious team spirit does not smell in such “teams”. More information about seven examples of the value of teamwork can be found on the site . I will give an example of the study of Uri Hasses:
Professor of the Princeton Institute of Neuroscience Uri Hasse, in the course of his research, discovered an unexpected brain activity of participants in the exchange of stories. “Not only is the similarity of brain activity in all listeners surprising. Not only that, but the storyteller had a very similar brain story - despite the fact that he was telling the story and the others were listening, ”says Hasse. Sharing opinions, stories can improve employee productivity. They can begin to feel, think and do the same as the heroes of the stories they have heard.
What is the reason for synergistic teamwork and how does this relate to goal setting? And the connection here is nowhere closer. Healthy team communication leads to the creation of a so-called “team crystallization”. The crystallization team is a group of people so closely connected that the whole becomes larger than the sum of its constituent parts.
The advantages of working in a team are the following:
You must use the command to create a common goal, then you can build a starting point - not the fact that it will be correct. But at least - your team will believe in it and go with you in the same direction.
I will not dive into the psychological side of the issue and understand the different models of development management. Instead, we will analyze the communicative component of teamwork and look for answers to two questions:
The key concept for parsing errors is communication. How are we used to working in teams? The classic development cycle looks like this: think up, develop, measure the result.
The length of these cycles is from 1 week to 4 weeks by Agile. In such conditions, there is no time left for communication between team members - we are all in a hurry to accomplish the tasks set. And everything would be fine, but why does part of the work go “to the table”?
To effectively work on a project and interact with the team, it is important to answer the following questions:
And the logical step in any development methodology will be to launch into the world of backlog prioritization. How to do it - use the RICE method? Or ICE? And if our product is just being created and we really do not know anything?
I will present to you one more tool that I actively use in the framework of the learning process, work in start-ups, and indeed in life.
As soon as possible to check the assumptions of the team? If you have a goal, the team generates ways to achieve it - a hypothesis. The list of hypotheses is growing every day: if at the beginning it is only 1–2, then by the end of the week there may be already 20–30.
How to prioritize them? Two tools will help here:
About this later.
HADI cycles are one of the tools of the methodology with which startups are “pumped”. The essence of HADI is simple. Almost any action affects some particular metric. If the changes are “bolted” to the indicators in advance, that is, to formulate hypotheses, the whole process of changes will be controlled. In short, you will understand how your actions influenced the result, and you can quickly test ideas, discarding non-working ones.
The management cycle begins with a hypothesis: if we make X, then it will affect Y, during T. We use SMART to form a hypothesis. “We assume we will make a landing page and get new customers. This formulation is written in the cell H - hypotheses.
How do we get customers? What needs to be done for this? You need to order a design, create, lay out a landing page, set up an advertising campaign. This action plan is written in cell A - actions.
How many customers are we expecting? If 100 new customers come, is it good, will it suit us? And 50? And 10? And just one? And not one? Sometimes it turns out that even if no client came, you still do not consider the hypothesis to be unconfirmed. There were no customers, but there were requests, it was just not possible to process them correctly. What will you look at and what to measure in order to confirm the hypothesis? This will be the number of applications, calls or sales and for what period? We write this in cell D - data. In cell I with the conclusions we write, for what value of the metric is the hypothesis considered confirmed.
What will you do if the hypothesis is not confirmed? Most likely, look for another way to achieve the same result, get 20 new customers. That is, formulate and begin to test the following hypothesis. And if confirmed? You will also check the following hypothesis, leading you further to the goal. Answers to these questions also need to be formulated in advance before starting to act. They complement cell I - conclusions.
After formulating the hypothesis, team members evaluate the complexity of its implementation and belief in success from 1 to 10. Everyone must justify his or her opinion. After all the ratings are put, the table should be sorted by increasing difficulty and decreasing faith. As a result, those hypotheses that the team needs to work on will be at the top.
HADI is a tool for quick experimentation on a project, not a team punishment.
Case examples from the Carrot Quest case
In our work in the framework of the startup, we used the hybrid HADIH, the main difference was that each line in the framework of the hypothesis ended not only with a set of Insights, but with new Hypotheses that flowed from the resulting insights. At the end of the iteration, these new hypotheses were included in the general backlog of hypotheses and were prioritized by faith and complexity. Thus, as part of working on the current hypothesis, we could generate related hypotheses for new iterations
In my team, I followed the following approach to organizing iterations and meetings:
There are many methods for managing expectations in a project, but problems of differences in expectations as the work progresses, while demonstrating results are symptoms of another, more serious problem.
You can read a lot of smart books, how to maneuver between requests, land expectations, not accept requests, but for me it all lies in the field of team decision making and open communication.
It is necessary to organize teamwork so that everyone understands the goal, including the customer. It is necessary to create conditions under which your team ignites work, will look for ways to achieve the set global goal.
I promise that it will be uncomfortable at first, and even then, growth is always painful.
Netology courses for interface designers:
How many times after an unsuccessful project I thought: “Now everything will be different, I gained experience. These things I will not do. And I will not take such projects. ” Feel the pain? Do you recognize yourself?
There is such a rubric - share what you learned through experience - with sweat and blood. I will share several techniques for managing expectations that I would have been happy about 8 years ago at the beginning of my IT career.
I’m sure that Jim Carrey’s “Always say yes” picture is to blame. But you and I are adults and we should understand that for a business any answer “yes” is a cost. And even worse, if you can not answer the question "Why yes?" And "How did it happen?"
')
"Your expectations - your problems" - what it means to manage expectations
From the dictionary: “Managing expectations - when you give a picture of the world of users,
the customer, the project sponsor, and other stakeholders as closely as possible to the reality, so that the collision with it is as painless as possible. ”
Matching reality, what is it? It's about creating a single "real". That is, the decrease in the difference between expectations and what is happening, which occurs when:
- The goal is vaguely articulated, that is, everyone goes in his own direction.
- There is no communication between team members, manager, customers.
- Everyone sees implementation in his own way.
In this article, I will consistently tell about each item and give practical tools that will help resolve the limitations in these areas.
If we reformulate the pains above, then the management of expectations is:
- Creating unified and understandable goals.
- Creating a unified platform for communications between all interested parties.
- Synchronization of what and how the team works.
SMART: how to set project goals
Six months ago, I moved to a corporate startup - and was not ready for the fact that all hypotheses should be tied to a specific goal and formulated by smart. I used to work, relying on my intuition, although she often let me down. And that was one of the most memorable Aha moments.
A correctly formulated goal allows to cut off the unnecessary, to create a single language of communication between team members.
The most common problem when setting goals is their abstractness:
The other day I spoke with my former colleague, who set himself the goal of “improving the main page of the site.” Like a goal, like a goal, but it’s not very clear what it means to improve, what to do and when, how to measure the result.
To turn an abstract goal into a concrete one, it is convenient to use goal-setting methodologies. There are many, the most simple and popular - SMART.
The technique includes five main characteristics that each goal must meet:
Specific
The goal must be specific. Concreteness is a clear understanding of the result to be achieved.
A bad example: “Make the interface better.” In this case, it is unclear what the current interface is bad, what needs to be improved. What is the metric?
A good example: "Increase conversion to target action from 1% to 3%." Such a specific formulation immediately gives an understanding of the scope of work, alternative tasks, for example, what tools to apply.
Measurable
The goal must be measurable. Each target must have some measure of measurement. With its help, you can understand whether you have achieved the desired result or not.
In the example above, this value is the conversion rates for the landing page. If we talk about other examples, then often we want to go on a diet or go to the gym. But it is not clear how many times you need to go to achieve the goal. Is one time enough or not? Here it would have worked better “To spend 10 trainings in the gym until January 31, 2019”.
Achievable
The goal must be achievable. Reachability affects motivation. It is not necessary to set very simple goals for yourself, because interest in this case also disappears. But no matter how you like, your brain is unlikely to take seriously the goal of "To be on the moon by February 1, 2019". But the goal of “Publishing an article by February 1, 2019” seems much more achievable and therefore interesting.
Relevant
The goal must be meaningful to you. Significance of the methodology in SMART - the value of the contribution that will bring the solution to this problem in achieving the strategic goals of the company.
Time bound
The goal must be limited in time. The goal of “Learning English” will be much less effective than “To pass the TOEFL certification at least 95 points by December 15, 2019”. When a time stamp appears to which you want to get a result, the brain in the offline mode builds a conditional timeline. You understand that for certification you need to learn, for example, 800 words. The brain understands that to do it in 3 days is unrealistic, so you need to make a plan.
Do not overstate the goal
Recently heard in one conversation:
- I set a plan for my month on X rubles, I think they can make about 70%.
- What for?
- There are several reasons: first, a bigger plan means the initial one will be easier. Heard about OCD? So this is a cool topic to manage, Google works on it. It is necessary to set KPIs higher so that a person does not perform more than 70 percent.
If you hear such a conversation from the head of the sales department, you can easily imagine that this way he motivates his team to rise and work. But if we talk about IT projects and products, then this approach is inefficient and destructive. First of all, you can read about OCD on the page .
OKR (from the English. Objectives and Key Results - goals and key results) - a method that is used in management to manage projects. Allows you to synchronize team and individual goals and provide effective control over the implementation of the tasks. The OKR method was developed by Intel. After gained distribution in a number of major technology companies, including Google, LinkedIn, Zynga.
In general, the technique to promise / put a higher plan to make a standard is a slippery slope:
- With the ideal performance of work you are not able to achieve the goal, which is unattainable by definition. Such work can not inspire. So - this will lead to the fact that your team will begin to stress, fatigue, and then burn out.
- Customers will be waiting for the optimistic scenario, although it is unrealistic, which means they can’t be explained that everything went right, just the goal was too high.
I saw another way of setting plans / goals, making them inflated for the team and understated when presented to customers. But the risks in this approach are the same as in the previous presentation. You run the risk of failing to over-plan to lose a team.
The bottom line: make plans that you can actually fulfill and for which you can vouch.
Communication at work
SMART can diagnose and synchronize the start of work on a project by creating a common point - the point of origin. But each has its own speed of movement, therefore, we need tools to synchronize the work.
Adjust the origin point
At the beginning of the article we focused on creating a field for effective communication by setting the right goal. And what about the decision, what should be the goal?
Find out the questions below:
- “Why does he decide everything? I also want to".
- "Why don't they value me?"
- "I did everything very well, just this thing hadn’t worked before."
- "I immediately said that this idea would not fly."
The problem with such statements is the lack of association with the goals and objectives of the team. Thus, the notorious team spirit does not smell in such “teams”. More information about seven examples of the value of teamwork can be found on the site . I will give an example of the study of Uri Hasses:
Professor of the Princeton Institute of Neuroscience Uri Hasse, in the course of his research, discovered an unexpected brain activity of participants in the exchange of stories. “Not only is the similarity of brain activity in all listeners surprising. Not only that, but the storyteller had a very similar brain story - despite the fact that he was telling the story and the others were listening, ”says Hasse. Sharing opinions, stories can improve employee productivity. They can begin to feel, think and do the same as the heroes of the stories they have heard.
Purpose and communication
What is the reason for synergistic teamwork and how does this relate to goal setting? And the connection here is nowhere closer. Healthy team communication leads to the creation of a so-called “team crystallization”. The crystallization team is a group of people so closely connected that the whole becomes larger than the sum of its constituent parts.
The advantages of working in a team are the following:
- In general, the team has more experience and knowledge than each individual participant.
- The team is more effective than individuals with regard to mistakes and eliminating their consequences.
- The decision taken in the team, rather approve those who have to carry it out.
- Team members are more likely to identify themselves with their own actions and contribution to the decision taken by the team. The probability that they will perceive the decision of the group as the right one is higher.
- Team members learn from each other and stimulate each other in the process of mutual learning.
You must use the command to create a common goal, then you can build a starting point - not the fact that it will be correct. But at least - your team will believe in it and go with you in the same direction.
How to work with development cycles?
I will not dive into the psychological side of the issue and understand the different models of development management. Instead, we will analyze the communicative component of teamwork and look for answers to two questions:
- Why am I waiting for one, and the team does another?
- Why do we understand the problem in the same way, but we cannot solve it?
The key concept for parsing errors is communication. How are we used to working in teams? The classic development cycle looks like this: think up, develop, measure the result.
The length of these cycles is from 1 week to 4 weeks by Agile. In such conditions, there is no time left for communication between team members - we are all in a hurry to accomplish the tasks set. And everything would be fine, but why does part of the work go “to the table”?
To effectively work on a project and interact with the team, it is important to answer the following questions:
- What will benefit and what not?
- How to prioritize the backlog, how to set tasks to work on?
- What to do?
And the logical step in any development methodology will be to launch into the world of backlog prioritization. How to do it - use the RICE method? Or ICE? And if our product is just being created and we really do not know anything?
HADI at work
I will present to you one more tool that I actively use in the framework of the learning process, work in start-ups, and indeed in life.
As soon as possible to check the assumptions of the team? If you have a goal, the team generates ways to achieve it - a hypothesis. The list of hypotheses is growing every day: if at the beginning it is only 1–2, then by the end of the week there may be already 20–30.
How to prioritize them? Two tools will help here:
- HADI cycles;
- team assessment of "faith and complexity" of working with the hypothesis
About this later.
HADI cycles are one of the tools of the methodology with which startups are “pumped”. The essence of HADI is simple. Almost any action affects some particular metric. If the changes are “bolted” to the indicators in advance, that is, to formulate hypotheses, the whole process of changes will be controlled. In short, you will understand how your actions influenced the result, and you can quickly test ideas, discarding non-working ones.
Hypothesis
The management cycle begins with a hypothesis: if we make X, then it will affect Y, during T. We use SMART to form a hypothesis. “We assume we will make a landing page and get new customers. This formulation is written in the cell H - hypotheses.
Actions
How do we get customers? What needs to be done for this? You need to order a design, create, lay out a landing page, set up an advertising campaign. This action plan is written in cell A - actions.
Data
How many customers are we expecting? If 100 new customers come, is it good, will it suit us? And 50? And 10? And just one? And not one? Sometimes it turns out that even if no client came, you still do not consider the hypothesis to be unconfirmed. There were no customers, but there were requests, it was just not possible to process them correctly. What will you look at and what to measure in order to confirm the hypothesis? This will be the number of applications, calls or sales and for what period? We write this in cell D - data. In cell I with the conclusions we write, for what value of the metric is the hypothesis considered confirmed.
Incites
What will you do if the hypothesis is not confirmed? Most likely, look for another way to achieve the same result, get 20 new customers. That is, formulate and begin to test the following hypothesis. And if confirmed? You will also check the following hypothesis, leading you further to the goal. Answers to these questions also need to be formulated in advance before starting to act. They complement cell I - conclusions.
HADI tables
After formulating the hypothesis, team members evaluate the complexity of its implementation and belief in success from 1 to 10. Everyone must justify his or her opinion. After all the ratings are put, the table should be sorted by increasing difficulty and decreasing faith. As a result, those hypotheses that the team needs to work on will be at the top.
HADI is a tool for quick experimentation on a project, not a team punishment.
Case examples from the Carrot Quest case
HADIH - Hybrid HADI
In our work in the framework of the startup, we used the hybrid HADIH, the main difference was that each line in the framework of the hypothesis ended not only with a set of Insights, but with new Hypotheses that flowed from the resulting insights. At the end of the iteration, these new hypotheses were included in the general backlog of hypotheses and were prioritized by faith and complexity. Thus, as part of working on the current hypothesis, we could generate related hypotheses for new iterations
How to build iterations
In my team, I followed the following approach to organizing iterations and meetings:
- At the very beginning of the implementation of the methodology, we held a session at 2 o'clock with all the team members and the customer to create the maximum number of hypotheses for the product. All the hypotheses were digitized and listed in the table; the team and I filled out the columns H, A, D. As a result, each hypothesis turned out to be in the SMART format.
- The next meeting was with the team and the tracker - he used different development methods and helped by asking questions. Each hypothesis was evaluated according to faith and complexity. At the same time, I added to the implementation time estimate to count the capacity of the team for a week
- We held a meeting every Friday to complete the current iteration and start the next one. At the meeting, we supplemented the table with insights and new hypotheses, shared the results of the work, decided to scale any hypotheses.
Do I need to manage expectations?
There are many methods for managing expectations in a project, but problems of differences in expectations as the work progresses, while demonstrating results are symptoms of another, more serious problem.
You can read a lot of smart books, how to maneuver between requests, land expectations, not accept requests, but for me it all lies in the field of team decision making and open communication.
It is necessary to organize teamwork so that everyone understands the goal, including the customer. It is necessary to create conditions under which your team ignites work, will look for ways to achieve the set global goal.
I promise that it will be uncomfortable at first, and even then, growth is always painful.
Netology courses for interface designers:
- course " Product Manager "
- course " Project Manager "
- Course " Flexible project management methodologies: Agile, Scrum, Kanban "
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/445510/
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