Turning a Potential Loss into a Win

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.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

How many times have you managed a project with so many bumps, there was no way you were going to finish on time and/or within budget? Hopefully this hasn’t happened too often, but it does happen. And when it does, it’s painful. You likely have a customer on the brink of dissatisfaction--or already there.

You are the project manager--you are supposed to be in control. But now--along with everything else--you also have to take corrective action and play peacemaker with the customer. It may or may not matter to the customer whether or not the issues were unavoidable. You’re the PM--you have the target on your head and you are just going to have to take the brunt of the backlash no matter who’s fault it is (or isn’t).

You have to start thinking about damage control. Why? Because you have two endgames to consider: What the final satisfaction level of the customer will be and if they’ll continue to do business with your organization; and--if it’s bad enough--how this will affect your career and your status in the organization. It’s time for corrective or evasive action, and time to . mend wounds and fix relationshipsHere’s how you do that:

• Don’t let the problem get any worse. Assuming you know what got you into this mess, work diligently with your team to make sure that things stay on track from this point…

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