Professional Services Professional: Operational Catalyst

Communicating without alienating

• Encouraging your customer to talk by listening persuasively
• Limiting use of jargon and speak to your listener’s concerns
• Creating awareness about what and how you communicate, guarding against conflicting messages

The Expectations Challenge

• Using the ‘That’s not it’ strategy to help a customer describe their needs
• Challenging your assumptions about customer needs and be an information-gathering skeptic
• Studying problems from your customers’ context

Perception is reality

• Clarifying customers’ perceptions of a service and their resulting expectations
• Ensuring customers know what to expect
• Assessing customer requests where it is appropriate and learning to say ‘no’ so it sounds like ‘yes’

Knowing your stakeholders

• Diagnosing your stakeholders’ interests and attitudes to a planned change
• Classifying the key influencer with the most power
• Determining your stakeholders’ resistance and how to engage them

Shaping your engagement strategy

• Targeting where you want your stakeholders to be
• Developing a user story and connecting your proposition with an explicit beneficial outcome
• Ascertaining the deposits and withdrawals you need to make in a stakeholders’ “relational bank account”

Planning your engagement

• Pinpointing your Gatekeeper(s) and scheduling communication to maintain engagement
• Creating compelling, sticky, memorable messages
• Classifying your signal-to-noise ratio to make your messages clear and heard

Controlling the scope

• Documenting the results of change control and maintaining the validity of the configuration
• Specifying effective requirement(s) – unique, current, consistent, understandable, verifiable, traceable and prioritised
• Capturing and assessing the impact of any change on the constraints including: time, cost, scope, change, risk resource

Being clear on your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement)

• Focusing on their “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) and optimising the benefits for both parties
• Earning the right to be heard by listening first
• Describing the non-negotiable aspects of your own position
• Being clear about your own fallback position before negotiating

Action is everything

• Practising intentional conversations using open questions
• Ensuring people see that you are responding to their concerns
• Checking you are not procrastinating on the uncomfortable business of contacting someone difficult