Build Shared Understanding: A Firm Basis for Sustained Project Excellence

Project excellence requires your whole project community to have a common understanding of what you are doing. Without it, team members and stakeholders will all be pulling in opposite directions. And in a large, complex project, there’s a lot of scope for confusion. So, what can you do to build shared understanding among your team – and your wider stakeholder group?

Agenda

This is what we will look at in this article, and we will break it into six sections:

1. Create a Share Understanding at the Start of Your Project
2. Clarifying the Shared Understanding among Team Members or Stakeholders
3. Ensuring a Shared Understanding, Day-to-Day
4. When a Problem Arises… The Team Needs a Shared Understanding
5. Misunderstandings: How they Arise and How to Rebuild a Shared Understanding
6. Misunderstandings Can Escalate to Conflict

‘Build Shared Understanding’ in the PMP Exam

The idea for this article came from PMI’s inclusion of this topic in the 2021 Examination Content Outline (ECO) for its Project Management Practitioner (PMP) exam. However, I see the specification in the ECO as missing a lot of important aspects.

As a result, I’ll be taking a much wider view of the topic. I hope it will be of much more practical value to practicing Project Managers than just an exam preparation resource.

Create a Share Understanding at the Start of Your Project

My first big critique of the PMP ECO is the implication that building a shared understanding is all about fixing a problem. The four enablers they list in Task 10 assume there is already a misunderstanding!

But, if you want to build shared understanding, start as you mean to go on. This work needs to happen right from the launch of your project. And the perfect place to begin is in your project kick-off meeting.

Start Building Shared Understanding at Your Team Kick-off

The place to start building a shared understanding is at your Project Kick-off. This is where you and your team get to meet one-another – often for the first time, for many people in the team.
There are many things that can come from a good kick-off, such as:

• A team charter or ground rules (which we’ll look at next)
• Understanding of what your project is and is not (we’ll look at that too)
• And understanding of one-another, and what each person brings

We have some great results to help you design and manage your Project Kick-off meeting:

• Project Kick-off Meeting: How to Make Your Next One a Huge Success
• Onboarding a New Team – with Elizabeth Harrin | Interview
• Build High-Performing Project Teams – Conversation with Charles Vivian

Build Shared Understanding into Your Team Charter and Ground Rules

Your Team Charter is likely to document your team’s shared understanding of things like:

• Shared values
• Expectations for how we communicate
• Processes (like decision-making and conflict resolution)
• Tools we use
• Authority
• Working hours – especially if team members span multiple time zones

Within your team charter, you may decide you want to set Ground Rules for behaviors within your team. Ground rules document a shared code of conduct for a team. They explain the behaviors that everyone needs to follow. In this way, they determine what is acceptable or not, within your team.

With a good set of ground rules, everyone has a shared understanding of what you and their colleagues expect of them. This not only creates a basis for consistent performance. It also establishes a baseline for fair treatment of your team members.

We have a detailed article on Team Ground Rules: Creating the Right Framework for Team Success and also a short video, How to Define Team Ground Rules.

Diversity and Inclusion

One aspect that is very important here is ensuring everyone has a common understanding of how you will prioritize diversity and inclusion in your project. Please do take a look at our video, How to Support Diversity and Inclusion in Your Team. And, for a deeper dive into this topic, you may like my discussion with Anita Phagura: Building Inclusive Teams: A Conversation with Anita Phagura of Fierce Project Management.

Create a Shared Understanding of What Your Project is Doing

Perhaps most fundamental of all is a shared understanding of what your project is, and is not. You need to work together with your team and your stakeholders to create a strong project definition. This will normally include:

• Goal
• Objectives
• Outline Scope

But it may also include other things like:

• Purpose
• Dependencies and Constraints
• Assumptions and Risks
• Key resources

This is such an important topic that we have a whole raft of resources for you. Start with: What is a Project Definition? | Video. And, if you want more, there is also:

• The Key Components of Your Project Definition
• What is Strategic Project Definition? | Video
• Project Definition: Three Big Questions about Your Project | Video
• Podcast: The Importance of Project Definition

Also, take a look at our…

Project Definition Kit

Take a jumble of ideas, needs, and requests and turn it into a well-defined project brief. 3.5 hours of structured learning.

Learn more about our Project Definition Kit.

Mission and Vision

One thing that you will certainly want to be sure everyone has a shared understanding of, is why you are doing your project: sometimes described as the mission and vision for your team. If you are not familiar with how to articulate these, do review our video: How to Set a Clear Vision and Mission for your Team.

Clarifying the Shared Understanding among Team Members or Stakeholders

We all have our own perspective from which we view our world. So, shared understanding is far from a trivial requirement! Let’s look at some of the tools we have open to us. I have split this up into:

• Media
  – the forum within which we can build shared understanding)
• Methods
  – techniques we can use – that often often in different media)

Media

Just sending a pack to read or getting your team together can be enough. But there are plenty of other approaches you can also take.

Briefings

Yes, we will start with briefings. You can do these:

• In person, one-on-one
• Live with a group – your whole team or all (or some) of your stakeholders
• In writing, as anything fro a short email to a long document

But you can supplement these approaches…

Demonstrations

People love to play. And nothing creates a stronger understanding than a demonstration. This is why prototypes and pilot stages are so powerful. They create a shared experience.

Imagery

Why settle for words, when you can use pictures. Not just simple pictures, but also:

• Diagrams
• Charts
• Maps
• Infographics

People love poring over these things and they can be better than words alone at conveying a clear understanding in many circumstances.

Videos

From static images to… moving images. Can you find or make a video that better creates a shared understanding?

Visits

Finally, field trips, reference visits, or trips to vendors’ facilities are a powerful way to build understanding among either team members or stakeholder groups.

Methods

You have chosen one or a combination of media. But, how will you craft a message that powerfully conveys the understanding you want to craft? Here are some ideas…

Storytelling

People love a good story and it is a fantastic way to wrap complicated ideas into an easy-to-understand package.

Analogy and Metaphor

Stories sometimes work by encapsulating a well-chosen analogy or metaphor. These represent the real, complex issue as something simpler or more familiar. The new sales process represented as making a sandwich, for example.

Surveys

Surveying stakeholders about their understanding can both measure the consistency of shared understanding and also plant the seeds of clarity in people’s minds. It can be a simple as the breadth of questions you ask alerting people to a common understanding of the breadth of the issue at hand.

Consensus Tools

Another set of tools for both measuring understanding and moving people towards alignment are consensus tools. Examples include:

• On the line
  Placing a definition or statement at one end of a room and asking people to stand as close to or as far from it as they wish to represent, for example, their level of understanding, or their degree of agreement with it.
• Polling
  Asking peopke to vote in one way or another. This can be show of habds or secret ballot, or by placing sticker dots against one or more of a set of statements on a board
• Fist of Five
  This is a nice method that combines the two above. Ask people to raise one -to five fingers to register levels of agreement or understanding.

Ensuring a Shared Understanding, Day-to-Day

As your project progresses, each member of your team will have different experiences. Inevitably, these will not just create differences in understanding of those experiences, but the experiences will color the team member’s perceptions of wider project issues.

Therefore, it is vital to keep your shared understanding current. So, how can you do that?

Formal Project Reports

There are many reasons or creating formal project reports. These include communication, audit trail, or decision-making. Yet, for all that, we often forget that an important prpose is to create a shared understanding of status.

Visualization of Project Status

Between reports, how does your team know the status of the project and any activities that are part of it? A great way is with team boards. These can hold things like:

• Dashboards
• Indicators
• Process charts
• Burndown Charts
• EVM Charts
• Action Lists
• Kanban Boards
• Checklists

I am a huge fan of this approach. Everyone can see the same data – and often you’ll allow anyone to update it. These visualizations can be either:

• Physical boards like blackboards, whiteboards, or flipcharts
• Online boards using stand-alone software or tools within wider Project Management systems

Team Meetings

Getting your team together for regular and ad hoc meetings is the best way to ensure everyone has a shared understanding of what”

• has happened
• is going on
• needs to be done

Your team meetings can take many formats, from daily stand-ups to big set-piece meetings. And there is much in between.

Do take a look at these great resources:

• How to Run a Great Project Team Meeting | Video
• How to Run a Really Great Project Meeting
• Good Meetings don’t Happen by Chance | Video
• How to Hold a Daily Stand-up Meeting | Video
• 5 Tips for Better Meetings | Video
• Meeting Actions: How to get People to do Them | Video
• Lessons Learned Meeting: How to make it Excellent | Video
• How to Get Your Next Lessons Learned Meeting Right

Sprint Ceremonies

Scrum and related agile methodologies have a wealth of meeting formats – all of which help to align understanding about one or another aspect of your project. Geat examples include:

• Sprint Planning
  To agree which elements of the project you will undertake in the next time window (sprint)
• Sprint Reviews
  To review progress and accept user feedback
• Sprint Retrospective
  To learn lessons and identify scope for improving processes and practices

When a Problem Arises… The Team Needs a Shared Understanding

A specific time when you will need to build shared understanding – and build it quickly – is when a problem arises. You’ll need to gather a team and rapidly ensure they all share the same understanding of:

• the problem
• its consequences

Here are a few of my favorite techniques.

Going to the Gemba

Waigaya

Waigaya is a made-up word, which best translates as hubbub. When you want to solve a problem (at the gemba!), get a team together to discuss it. In a brilliant article about how Honda developed this technique, we learn that a Waigaya has four rules:

1. Everyone is equal in waigaya. Everybody can express their thoughts openly, without criticism.
2. The group must debate all ideas until they are either proven valid or rejected.
3. Once someone shares an idea, it’s not theirs anymore—it belongs to the organization. The group can do with the idea what it wants.
4. Waigaya ens when the team makes decisions and assigns responsibilities: who will do what, and by when.

Root Cause Analysis

There are many ways to try to build a shared understanding of the root causes of a problem. Some of my favorites are:

• 5 Whys technique
• Fishbone (or Ishikawa) analysis
• Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

For further information on Problem Solving, we have a feature article, Problem Solving: A Systematic Approach. We also have some great supplementary resources:

• Could You Survive on Mars? Problem-Solving | Video
• Two Approaches to Solving Project Problems | Video
• What is Design Thinking? Human-centered Problem-solving | Video

Misunderstandings: How they Arise and How to Rebuild a Shared Understanding

In this section, I want to draw upon two important ideas from my book, How to Speak so People Listen. These are:

• The Different Levels of Understanding
• The Story-forming Process

We will look at each in turn, and then look at my favorite method for narrowing down a misunderstanding.

The Different Levels of Understanding

The first model explains why we can have a very different understanding of the same situation or event, from someone else. It is because we understand things at a range of different levels. Each level informs how the levels close to it operate. And our cumulative experiences gradually inform how each level operates.

The Story-forming Process

A second model illustrates how we build our own understanding (or story) from what we hear or experience. And the story or understanding we form, determines the choices we will make and therefore, the actions we will take. This is, fundamentally, why building a shared understanding among your project community is so important.

Dividing the Pie: A Method for Narrowing-down the Scope of a Misunderstanding

It is easier to move from agreement to agreement than from disagreement to an agreement.  So, you need to find the source of any misunderstanding.  One way to do this is to look at all the parts of the topic and assess which you agree or disagree about.

Abe:    “Your conclusions are all wrong; I completely disagree”

Bea:     “You don’t agree with my conclusions: is it the findings you disagree with or the way I interpreted them?”

Abe:    “The findings are fine.  Your analysis is wrong.”

Bea:     “Okay, so we’re agreed on the findings.  Now, you don’t like my analysis: is it my methodology you disagree with, or the way I carried it out?”

Abe:    “You worked through it fine, but you should never have taken that approach.”

Bea:     “Good, so let’s discuss what other approaches I could take.”

Notice how you are both in agreement on a couple of important issues and the scope of your disagreement is now much narrower.  You are no longer about to argue about whether the work is rubbish; instead, you can discuss approaches in a rational way. And, chances are, there is a misunderstanding somewhere in the details. So, continue to cut up the pie until you find the slices you need to build agreement about.

Misunderstandings Can Escalate to Conflict

The ultimate failure to build shared understanding is conflict. Conflict most often arises from one of two things:

1. A mismatch in needs, desires, values, perspectives
2. A misunderstanding, that leads to a perceived mismatch in needs, desires, values, perspectives

However, we need to keep this article to a reasonable length. And I do have a huge wealth of resources on the topic of conflict already:

• articles
• videos
• a full course

So, I will list them all for you to review at your leisure.

Here are our Conflict Management Resources

• Managing Conflict: Everything a Project Manager Needs to Know
• Conflict Management: Ways to Get it Right | Part 2
• How to Understand the Sources of Conflict | Video
• How to Understand the Stages of Conflict | Video
• Conflict in Project Management: It’s Your Fault | Video
• Managing Difficult Conversations: Your Guide to How to Get them Right

But to go into it in-depth, we have our full course:

Dealing with Conflict in Projects

A Practical Introduction to Conflict Management for Project Managers.

Check it out.

What is Your Experience of Building a Shared Understanding among Your Project Community?

Please do ask questions or share your experiences and opinions in the comments below. I’ll be delighted to respond to all contributions.