Survivors and Scapegoats

  ProjectsAtWork  

The politics of surviving no-win projects.

Politics in the workplace is a reality-a necessary evil, many would suggest. For project managers, the ability to politic can be the difference between being a survivor and a scapegoat, says John Kashen, executive project manager at IBM Global Services.

"Corporate politics has a negative connotation, but it's not always true," says Kashen. "Politics is OK if it's about communicating with senior management, finessing control for the good of the project. It's bad if it's about self-promotion, placing individual wants over team needs."

At no time will artful politics be more important, Kashen says, then when a project manager is confronted with a "no-win" project. These projects, often doomed from the start, fail for a number of reasons:

1. Failure to filter out bad ideas: The project shouldn't have been assigned.

2. Planning to please: Schedule, budget, ROI are based on sponsor expectation.

3. No support: The project is a sinking ship, and the sponsors have bailed.

Many of these causes, it should be noted, have more to do with "managing" your executive management than managing your project. Kashen says most project managers don't realize that they often have the unspoken power to tie the fate of a project to …

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