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Dealing with Project Downsizing
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
The experts can continue to debate whether or not we are currently in a global recession, but I suspect for the majority of you reading this you don’t care whether there have been two consecutive quarters of economic contraction--the economy is suffering, and likely so is your organization. That means that people are expected to do more, with less, and with a greater sense of urgency. Failure to get that product to market ahead of the competition, or missing that big contract, may truly spell disaster.
So what happens when the economic reality hits your project? How do you cope when you lose resources, either reassigned to other initiatives or lost to the company completely?
Deal with the people first
It doesn’t matter whether someone resigns and isn’t replaced, whether they are made redundant or whether they are simply reassigned to another project. When your project loses staff, the remaining team members will worry. Before you can do anything to get the project back on track you need to make sure that your team is with you--they need to believe in their project manager.
First things first: They don’t care how you feel. I don’t mean that to be harsh, but any conversation that includes words like “this is tough for me, too, you know” is not going to go well. If friends and colleagues have just been let go, …
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