Balancing Expectations

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.

  Communications Management   Talent Management  

Just as project managers have some fundamental expectations of project team members, they have some fundamental expectations of you. These expectations should be the minimum we should strive for on both sides. Look at these expectations as the low bar that we should plan to hit and rise above. If you’re a PM or a project team member failing on any one of these basic expectations, consider it an area of weakness that you must work on. Failure in any one of these general areas is causing problems for your project manager or team--and that it is something you must address earnestly and immediately.

First, let’s look at the basic expectations that project managers should have for their project team members…

• Be committed to the project. At the very core of PM expectations for their team members is the thought that those team members will remain committed to the project. It’s understandable that most or all team members will have other obligations and possibly even other active projects that they are working on, but it remains their responsibility to work toward the goals of this project and successfully complete the tasks assigned to them.
• Provide accurate and truthful status. Project managers need accurate project status information to provide to the project customer, and usually this comes from the team members assigned to the tasks on…

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