A Project Manager's View

We don't let it happen, We make it happen.

Parker-Joseph Consulting

A Project Manager’s View

When the Project Manager can see their Project falling to bits. (use case)

You are an IT Project Manager, you have a successful career, well established in a good company environment, but you are having one of those really bad project days, when you can see your IT project about to fall to bits.

You have reached that stage where you believe that no matter what you do, the project is on the slippery slope heading down the mountain at breakneck speed, its getting out of control, the teams you are working with have run out of motivation and it seems everyone is letting you down.

There may be a lethargy towards projects in the organisation, few seem to care whether it works or not, perhaps because your project takes in several empires who keep injecting new requirements so the politics are getting in the way which slow you down even further day by day.

It may be that you don’t feel that you are getting the right back up and support from on high, you have a manager who only likes to report good news upstairs, your suppliers tell you when you can have the kit rather than when you need it, and you are being told not to upset them as there is a ‘special price’, a project being driven by the bean counters, and now its running late, with the budget and motivation draining away daily.

Yet you know that you have been following process, you have been doing all the right things, but perhaps you have not been adequately empowered and no-one is listening, and now you have to go tell the boss that its going to fail, you have failed, and its going to cost them a lot of money.

This kind of scenario is much more common than you think, but don’t give up just yet, as more often than not, it can be recovered.

It’s the environment that I work best in. I am a Crisis Project Manager and I can help.

I have spent many years reshaping projects, 'talking' with suppliers, getting stakeholder buy in, injecting a sense of urgency with project teams, stopping the politics in their tracks, even on occasion 'talking' to the bosses.

Every project manager knows that when you are part of the internal mix, many of the things that you try to advise or explain to middle and senior management are never listened to.

Then you see a consultant arrive, say the same things and they are listened to, they even say things that as part of the permanent head count you dare not say.

Perhaps its because they are paying good money to be spoken to in a frank and critical way that they listen, rather than just being part of the business as usual cost overhead. (Familiarity and all that).

Its a fact of life, unfortunate though it is, that project managers are rarely given the real authority to manage their projects properly.

But you can change that.

A few years back I was asked by a big Canadian corporation to help them in just this way.

They were providing Services to their client, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, to build their Pan European Internet Network from scratch.

The two companies had been discussing this project for nearly a year, the client company had even sold off one of its divisions to pay for the project, but at some stage during their negotiations one of the client company's marketing people had picked up on a date, and published it as their public launch date.

Then the panic set in, everyone realised that there was little or no time left to do the project itself. (sound familiar).

By the time they had called me, they had 8 weeks left before the public launch.

So, first things first. Did I have a well described project and a team. Well, yes of sorts. The Business Case and objectives were in place, and they had already hired in a Design Architect. Probably one of the best that I have ever worked with as it turned out, totally sound, so we had design capability, and with him working alongside IP and Network designers that part of the team looked good.

Rest of the team ok, except, DNS expertise and Network Management.

This had been farmed out to a large PC and Server manufacturing organisation as part of their customer services structure. They wanted 10 weeks to think about how they would undertake the project, then they would submit their plan, with possibly a further 13 weeks for deployment.

Hmmm, got rid of them. I only had 8 weeks to complete this, so replaced them with a single contractor, who turned out to be worth his weight in gold, and purchased the equipment from another supplier.

The prime supplier, the world's largest producer of ISP routing and switch equipment was generally unresponsive and had the attitude of 'we are so big that we decide when you get your equipment and will let you do your project when we are ready'.

Crossed my legs and said Sorry, but they had to go as well.

We found a good, lean, hungry reseller, with a warehouse full of equipment who bit my hand off at the chance of a project this size, so new supplier with the same branded equipment.

Not unexpectedly, it wasn’t that long before the golf course politics came into play.

The Directors of the client company wanted to know how I could possibly justify removing 2 of the world’s biggest IT manufacturing corporations from the project.

To me this was simple.

The client had already published the date for launch, they had set it in stone, and marked it as critical.

The vendors could not perform in the timescales that the project dictated, so their continued involvement would therefore be detrimental to the outcome of the project and critically increase the risk to the client’s business plan.

The real question here must be;

At this point in the clients business development plan, was the delivery of the project more important than the client’s long standing relationship with these particular suppliers?.

The outcome had now served 2 purposes. Firstly, it established Board approval for my actions, and secondly provided the authority for my Project Method and the Project Plan.

Don’t let the politics dictate the project rules, it has to be the business needs that set the agenda.

With the biggest risks to the project now removed, and with a new project plan in place, it all seemed relatively simple after that, fast but simple, and the middle management politics were easy to quash after the high level stuff had been sorted out. It just required the appliance of logic, and the determination to push it through.

In the following weeks, my team worked wonders, and I only have the greatest respect for all of them, as there was an awful lot of work done in a very short space of time.

They sourced the sites around Europe that could house the equipment, finalised the designs, RIPE authorisations done in record time, all the environmental’s locally agreed and installed, circuits organised, ordered the kit, got it delivered, installed, commissioned, including the Network Management Centre, put everything through a rigorous testing regime and brought the project to RFS in 6 and a half weeks.

We did it. We did the impossible, or what most of our peers considered impossible.

There are of course minor downsides to working a project at this speed, one was the need for a very small amount of remedial work, and inevitably through the haze and euphoria of success,

the faint hearted who had previously jumped ship and distanced themselves firmly away from the project suddenly reappeared, patting themselves on the back with self congratulatory aplomb, like professional credit takers, and the emergence of the process driven nit-pickers, but I guess that’s just part of the world we live in, and have to live with.

So, what has this to do with helping you get your project back on track.

What I am really trying to get across here with this example is that given the real authority, the trust and support to get on with it, the majority of Project Managers can accomplish most things.

By taking the responsibility for your project rather than asking for it, it gives you the freedom to run your project properly, but more importantly you turn around the onus of that responsibility.

If you ask your Management whether you can take a particular view or decision, you have to justify why you want to do it and they can say no. That then is your fault.

OK, so this works if you are part of a blame culture environment.

But by using your authority and responsibility and telling your Managers what you have done in order to move your project forward, they then have to justify why they are telling you to undo it, and validate adding delays to your project.

Always remember that it is your project, not theirs. It carries your name and with it your reputation.

These are rules that need to be established right at the very beginning of any project assignment, try where-ever possible work within the political and corporate framework, but understand that some projects are just not capable of working within that framework, where processes often put too many constraints on critical projects.

For Recovery Projects, RPM takes on a whole new meaning, where speed and the deliberate exclusion of internal politics is essential.

For those Project Managers who unfortunately still find themselves mired down in the politics or processes with no real bite to their job title, get a Crisis Project Manager to come in to assist you.

There are of course many more scenarios when projects go wrong, each project, each environment is different, but if you can relate to the view above, if this is your situation , send me an email or phone me, and lets see if I can assist you to get your project back on track.

Ian Parker-Joseph ian@parker-joseph.co.uk