What stories does your team tell about its projects? Often it’s easy to poke fun at the surprises and failures and how individuals have struggled. But do those stories help?

Communications professionals speak of the importance of telling the business’s stories. Training is made more interesting (and more tolerable) by the study of stories that reinforce the messages and learnings. Project management magazines run feature articles on the stories of tough projects and the leadership provided by great project managers as they struggled with those projects. So why not tell stories about your project successes?

There are two fundamental reasons why captivating project management stories are scarce. First, for most businesses, there aren’t that many project successes – particularly project successes that are the clear wins that would be uncontested by large organizations. In most projects, the tough tradeoffs made during the project execution often leave some people or some departments less-than-excited about the outcome. Not that those tradeoffs were necessarily wrong for the overall business, it’s just that usually some folks don’t get what they want.

Secondly, it’s hard to agree on the facts. Projects are dynamic, best practices don’t guarantee best results, and when invention is required – well, few people believe you can invent to schedule. So where are the facts that determine the measurement of success? They are hard to find.

But you still need to tell stories. The best leadership practitioners will tell you that stories are important, so you need to look for stories about your projects that:

1. Reinforce the values of the project organization such as being open, honest, or truth-telling

2. Talk about valuable project results such as new customers, customer satisfaction, profit, or cost

3. Build teamwork or performance in the organization, and

4. Stories that talk about schedule and investment success.

Project leaders need to commit time to develop their story telling skills and the stories that they can use when the timing is right. If you’re a great ad-libber you might be able to tell a powerful and on-message story with no notice, but for most of us, having a few well-prepared and powerful stories ready-to-go is the best answer.

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