Evan J Schwartz

Shift your technique. Unless you’re a bulk widget sales person you should shift to relationship sales where you first seek to provide value and consultation. Partner with your prospect, understand their need, and realize that making a sale from every opportunity isn’t the goal. Building a strong prospect that sees you more as a trusted consultant; an aid to help them resolve problems with the products and services you provide will yield far more in the long run than forcing a sale at every opportunity. Having provided value to your prospect even if your product is not the best fit, will take much of the sting out of the rejection. In fact it won’t even feel like a rejection, just a reasonable collaborative decision between partners.

Conflicting stakeholder feedback is typically due to a misunderstanding somewhere that’s led to the conflict. Active listening while probing for more detail using open ended questioning will help to reveal requirements that might be well understood by your stakeholder, but may not be well understood by your project team members or perhaps simply weren’t well articulated and documented. Depending on your project, it’s likely that your stakeholders won’t appreciate the need to be very detailed with documenting requirements, success criteria, and impacts on upstream activities. To them, these things should be obvious and easy to understand. So, follow good business analyst rules and listen, ask open ended questions, and document.

Beyond understanding local needs, foster cooperation in resource-scarce areas by leveraging technology to improve communication and resource management. Introduce sustainable practices and innovative solutions tailored to the community's unique challenges. Facilitate skill-building workshops to empower residents with new capabilities. Encourage partnerships with NGOs, government agencies, and private sector entities to bring additional resources and expertise. Promote transparency in decision-making processes to ensure all voices are heard, enhancing collective ownership and commitment to shared goals. Having an expressive strategy with clear priorities around goals, you'll build confidence in the effective use of existing resources.

Leadership, in any form, requires authenticity, reflection, and the ability to communicate effectively across a diverse spectrum of cultures, domains, and personalities. While understanding your unique communication style and how it impacts others is important, what is more important is your ability to adapt styles and incorporate them within your toolset enabling you to be a more effective motivator and influencer both within your team and your leadership. Investing in and strengthening your adaptability will significantly broaden settings in which you can be productive. But beginning this journey of growth requires you to establish a baseline from which to build. “Know thy self.”

AI has been invaluable for cross work-stream artifact validation. The ability to compare multiple integration documents and align them against the solution architecture document and blueprint document for functional requirement alignment, success criteria validation, insights on gaps or errors, and even task alignment is huge! Some projects create hundreds of documents with nuanced requirements. Onboarding new resources now allows them to ask questions of the knowledge base to quickly become productive. Sorting through an email thread 35 replies deep and ask, “why am I getting this email?” And AI knows you’re the solution architect and summarize the email for you, is an incredible force multiplier! It also cuts down on needed meetings!

Both active projects and archived projects benefit mightily through well organized artifacts that are both searchable and easily organized. But, in the last 5 projects I’ve been involved in, the most powerful tool has been to ingest artifacts through Generative AI. Having a predictable metadata and organizational system allows you to support the AI agent with a RAG configuration to boost accuracy allowing project members to ask the AI agent details about the project and get incredible insights and details. Questions like “Does our success criteria for this integration meet all requirements?” You’ll get a full cross workstream document analysis and it can pick out contradiction, gaps, and errors in the artifacts! Incredibly powerful!