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Nightmare on PM Street
Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.
Gather around goblins and ghouls for the latest chilling tale from our Project Management Nightmares series! Rather than bore you with tales about sliding scope, mismanaged schedules and poor performing vendors, I thought I’d write about a topic that can be a nightmare on projects if it is mismanaged--relationships.
You can take a project manager who can quote the PMBOK by knowledge area and process group, arm them with the latest project management tool that builds self-managing schedules and provide the project manager with project resources that make a Navy S.E.A.L. team envious. Despite all these talents, they can’t defeat the monster of a mismanaged relationship. When you analyze successful projects, they succeed because of the healthy relationships formed with team members, stakeholders and vendors. The nightmare begins when these relationships are poorly formed, trust is lost and you still have six months to deliver a poor performing project.
My project nightmare started when I was a business analyst working on an aggressive IT project for a human resources business function. I could cite the lack of scope control, poorly performing vendors and the lack of leadership as reasons for the project nightmare. However, the root cause was the poorly formed relationships among the company, their internal development team and the vendors. During the …
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