In English, Please?

One project management skill group you won’t see called out on the PMP exam is "Translating." By that I mean being able to render TechSpeak to ExecSpeak and vice versa. PMs need to rapidly switch gears depending on their audience in order to explain the same situation in utterly different ways.

Let’s start with business requirements. From the perspective of the developers, architects and testers on your team, the statement of work or requirements document that your customer hands down might seem preposterously vague. “Improve processing time?” “Create a better user experience?” “Build a more reliable environment?” What does any of this mean? How is it quantified? What is the success criteria?

The project manager’s response might be to facilitate a requirements clarification session with the technical leads and the customer, serving as a translator/negotiator to help break down each requirement. Listening, rephrasing, and explaining are the crucial skills (“so what I hear you saying ….”) Through this process, “improve processing time” evolves to “be able to process a minimum of 1000 transactions per minute” and eventually to a detailed set of system changes needed to support this requirement (and finally to a task-level work breakdown structure with dates and deliverables.)

The communication gap can also arise when trying to explain a problem. For example, if development hits a snag, the response from the coder working on the problem can be an endless stream of alphabet soup describing failed job names or mismatched database fields or misaligned middleware scheduler entries. The project manager’s mandate is to distill all of this into a concise “elevator speech” for their client (ie, “the data isn’t showing up correctly because of a problem with the interface to the upstream system; we’re targeting a fix for tomorrow.”) If they want more details, be prepared to explain in more depth. But often times, especially with senior level execs, an assurance that you’ve identified the problem and will solve it quickly is sufficient.

The information needs of executive customers and technical project team members will differ greatly by organization. For example, you may be lucky enough to have a customer with whom you can talk the language of field formats and DNS entries (at my own job, this is often the case) but don’t bank on it. Mastering Exec to Tech translation skills should be high on the agenda for anyone in project management.