If you are selling large deals, you’ll reach a point when your job requires more than the standard Zig Ziglar call to action.
Cutco knives, Tupperware, Amway, those salespeople deal with a lot, but the scope of their pitch is somewhat limited. Customer pays, salesperson hands over the goods.
With large deals, services in particular, to enterprise customers, things get a bit more complex. You’ll either be handing off the work to a delivery organization (the people who build and deliver what you sell) with a dedicated project manager (PM), or you’ll be running some of the project management yourself.
Call that job a Sales PM if you like. I do.
If that is the kind of work you do, it’s helpful to get everyone speaking a common language. You don’t need to get certified in Project Management, although that’s not a bad idea, but you need to understand enough to get the ball rolling on whatever it is you just sold.
And that is where I use the Project Management Pyramid. A rudimentary Project Management approach that can help confirm client needs as well as give your delivery organization the raw materials needed for a successful project.
But before we get to that, I think we should talk about Father of the Bride. Because Franck Eggelhoffer (Martin Short) is a damn fine example of a Sales PM.
If you are confused, I don’t blame you. I never noticed it either. But my wife and daughter were watching Father of the Bride last weekend, and my timing could not have been better. I walked in just as my favorite scene started.
Franck is meeting with the Banks family. Annie Banks (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) and Franck are discussing the big day. He is gathering the requirements and working to understand his new customer.
I hadn’t seen the movie in years, and I was struck by something. This meeting between Franck and the Banks family is a lot like my meetings.
One or two clients are fired up about what I have to say.
Someone else is invited and they are less enthusiastic but (unfortunately) involved, maybe they are signing off on the budget or managing the resources.
And there are those unavoidable moments during the meeting where everyone is confused about what I’m saying.
Here is the scene for the uninitiated. [first 90 seconds]
Just replace the Banks wedding with something techie, like implementing an AI Chatbot on your website and you’ll have my life.
“Now, so, you have not made up your list yet… but you know that you want de wedding at hom on Jawn-wary six.
Mmm, I luff the weddings at the homs. They’re vary personable, very varm ‘n’ cuzy, vary fabulous.
Oh, so, Jawn-wary six gif us seven munths. Uh-oh! Hello! That’s five munths!
Five munths not much! But that don’t bother me so much because it’s a little bit tight… but we can do it and it will be spak-takuler!”
Of course, when things are “a little bit tight,” we know that they will typically be a little bit expensive as well. That is the tradeoff.
Do you need a plumber? Or do you need a plumber today?
It’s a different order all together.
So, while we intuitively understand a lot of this, there is a useful framework it falls under and that is where the Project Management Pyramid comes in handy.
There are different versions of the pyramid, but what they represent is something called a triple constraint. And it doesn’t matter if you are planning a wedding or website, constraints are a good thing to understand.
Constraints are important to discuss up front, because people tend to get carried away with their requests. Unless we remind them of the constraints, both sides will be unhappy with the outcome.
If I were you, I’d select the attributes, the constraints, and use the pyramid to guide conversations at work and at home.
If you are making dinner, maybe it’s the triple constraint of healthy, tasty, and easy. And that’s why you have burrito bowls three nights a week. A frozen pizza doesn’t bring the same level of satisfaction, it’s easy, but lacks the healthy and tasty attributes. Although those DiGiorno’s aren’t bad.
No doubt my wife was looking for someone tall, dark, and handsome. I got burned mowing the lawn yesterday.
Tradeoffs were made. Constraints were addressed.
The Project Management Pyramid is a visual representation of “you can have anything, but you can’t have everything.”
The Gates Foundation:
I learned about the Project Management Pyramid early in my career while working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They are a giving bunch over there. My customer, let’s call her Deborah, was listening to me run through my understanding of an upcoming project.
I must have sounded less than confident because she stopped me and asked what I needed in order to make the project a success.
She said, “I can get some flexibility, but I need to know what exactly you need us to bend on?”
I was still confused so she went on, “If you think you can get it all done, on time, but it will be twice the price, let me know and I’ll get the budget. But it still sounds like it’s uphill both ways to me.”
At the Gates Foundation, cost was not a constraint.
Deborah was a great customer and a better teacher.
She grabbed a dry erase marker and sketched the pyramid on the white board. She described it as though it was a Ouija Board, as your hands glide across the pyramid, from one side to the other, you are gaining one attribute and losing another.
Slide all the way over on time (meaning it’s gotta be fast), and it is going to cost you some money. And the quality will be affected. Like your plumbing issue.
Slide the other way, all the way on cost (you need it cheap), and it pulls on quality (lower) and speed (slower).
It was a relief to know that Deborah was not sold on the plan as it stood and was willing to work with me.
I said, “No, I agree, we will still fail with more budget. I really need to lower the bar (scope). The pricing is fine, and the timing is fast, but we can do it. It’s the high bar you all have that will limit our ability to build the team to your specifications.”
To me, the project seemed simple enough, so why did we need a bunch of Ivy League degrees and every certification under the sun?
She walked out of the room and returned nine minutes later with two teammates that were there to discuss “how low is too low.”
And we got to work.
Scope, Schedule, Spend:
The pyramid was described that day using speed, cost, and quality. Again, choose your adventure and the constraints you are interested in.
The primary drivers in my current work are scope, schedule, and spend. The fourth attribute being quality, an outcome of those three primary drivers.
I think of quality as the top of the pyramid, scope, schedule, and spend as the sides. If you move dramatically to any one side, the stability (quality) of your pyramid will suffer.
Tradeoffs:
Tradeoffs are an inevitable issue because people want what they want. And the larger the group, the harder it can be to identify what is really required.
Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs; and you try to get the best trade-off you can get.”
Thomas is right on, and luckily for me I only had a few stakeholders to deal with at the Gates Foundation. Their primary driver was the schedule. They needed the work done on time, yesterday. I told them that cost was not going to save the day, so we were left with one primary constraint to move away from, scope. We lowered the bar on their requirements and got after it.
Note that lowering the bar, limiting the scope, has a perceived impact on quality. That can be true, but people will overengineer things at the beginning. They add bells and whistles that don’t impact the project or product.
If you need a library, and the primary use is to get people books, do you need it to also be made out of diamond shaped panes of glass?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the design of the Seattle Public Library, but clearly, they didn’t have many constraints.
In fact, the advice I hear most often is to “Reduce the scope, stick to the schedule.” That is a method that will insure you ship the project, and you can then circle back and add functionality and scope in subsequent versions.
What the pyramid can do is make it easy to visualize those tradeoffs.
What about Annie’s Wedding?
How did this all play out for Annie and the Banks family?
We know she wants her wedding at their home in five months (schedule).
As Franck says (and I’ll translate), “It’s a little bit tight…but we can do it and it will be spectacular.” Spectacular sounds like a high-quality event to me.
They are clearly willing to spend some cash, they said yes to the $1,200 cake (spend).
What was undecided was the guest list, the number of people invited (scope). And that is exactly the area where they made some tradeoffs.
“$250 a head means for the four of us to attend this wedding in our own home… will cost $1,000. Therefore, we are not getting up from this table… until we cut this list down to the bare minimum.
Now, invite as many people as you want to the church, pack ’em in… build a grandstand if you want, but we are not having… more than 150 people in this house on the day of the wedding. All right. Now let’s start eliminating.”
Life is full of constraints and tradeoffs, they are important to understand and communicate, but that shouldn’t keep Annie Banks from having a spak-takuler wedding.
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