Be the cheerleader! Market your project

Meeting in the conference room

You’ve been working this project for months. Your team is stellar – work is progressing and you’re on track to make your budget, your timeline, and your quality marks. So why isn’t anyone else excited about the project?

No one knows to be excited because you haven’t told them to be excited.

The art of project management

People get into project management for many different reasons. Most project managers really enjoy the organizing, directing, and completing assignments. We get to see the final results. When we’re done, we’re often puzzled as to why we get an “Attaboy” from the sponsor, and the rest of the company doesn’t seem to care.

Or, when we’re done, the defined deliverable is criticized because someone outside the project isn’t happy with the end result. You and your sponsor are now spending time defending the end result of a successful project. What? Haven’t you just saved the company significant money every month?

Good work doesn’t always get noticed.

Marketing your project

How many project managers include marketing their project in their communication plan? For most company-based project managers, the entire organization is also considered a stakeholder.  You may think installing a new accounting software update only affects the Accounting Department, but what about the organizations and staff members contributing to the accounting system? What about the sales people who now need to enter their orders differently or will receive different reports? How about the admins who enter expense reports – what changes for them?

I managed a project for a training organization that facilitated the software and data that was loaded onto the computers in each of as many as a several dozen classrooms across the U.S.  At first glance, this project only affected the Training Organization. After all, it was about classroom training packages. But in this customer-focused organization this was a big change that made this company’s software classes easier to run and maintain, improving the classroom experience for students and instructors. Everyone in the organization needed to understand the deliverables.

Outreach is important

Every week, I wrote an update that went out in the company’s employee email newsletter. The update was also part of the employee Home Page on the internal network. I also gave updates at division “All Hands” meetings and even department team meetings. This outreach was to insure that everyone was clear about the project benefits and that this phase of the project was U.S. only. International training centers were part of the second phase due to the complex IT infrastructure needed at each training center.

Did everyone read the employee email newsletter? No. Did everyone see the information on the Home page? Probably not. When the project finally ended, it was a company-wide celebration – not just my project team, or even just the Training Department. The project was very successful and the entire company felt that success. Customers and instructors were thrilled that the classroom computers could be refreshed in minutes from a central location. No more wasting classroom time waiting for a tech to come in, sit down, and type madly for 30 minutes fixing or replacing corrupt files or data.

Your project marketing plan

As project managers, we are not necessarily marketing experts. We are focused on getting that project done with the budget and team that we have. Often, we’re not paying enough attention to those other stakeholders that could affect how your success is perceived.  Let your teams do the work and you spend a few minutes telling the rest of the organization about that good work.

Company communication

Most companies have periodic employee newsletters, meetings and other gatherings that can be used as a forum for you and your project. Pay attention to those emails, web pages, and collaboration sites that your company maintains. Offer to speak at team meetings and company functions. Assign a team member to write the updates if that makes sense. Get the word out about the good work you and  your team are doing.

Want a sample marketing plan? Here’s one I modified from a template I found on Microsoft.com. Make it your own.

Click here to get your Marketing plan template as a xlsx file.

Click here to get your Marketing plan template as a PDF file.

Do you use a Marketing plan for your projects? Tell us in the comments below!