Fake It Till You Make It

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

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As IT organizations are being asked to do more with less, there’s a tendency to move non-project managers or inexperienced project managers into leadership roles on projects that matter. We see what used to be functional managers and resource managers leading projects outside of their normal comfort zone. What’s more, most of these individuals aren’t going to resist the assignments because they want to remain useful and viable--and the alternative might mean trying to find a job in this jobless economy.

So, let’s assume for a moment that we’re all new project managers or new to project management. We’ve been assigned a project and a team and we’re getting ramped up to kick off the engagement. What do we do with this thing that has been dropped in our lap? And if your background is primarily resource management, there are other issues to deal with. Resource management is not project management, and project management is not just about resource management. How do we manage these people who aren’t tethered to us, resources who probably have three or four other projects to worry about and another functional manager to report to? How do we exert any jurisdiction over them? How do we make them perform our tasks on our project?

Basically, as with just about anything new in life, we have to--as the title says--try to “…

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