Managing through Adversity

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   Risk Management   Stakeholder Management  

No one ever said that managing projects and complex project teams was easy. And I doubt that any project manager you asked would say their job was a breeze. Even on the most organized, well-run project, the job of managing the client, their needs, the tasks of your project team and your reporting responsibilities to senior management can be enough to drive a sane project manager off the deep end.

Adversity on a project can come in many different shapes and sizes. A few of the big ones that I’ve either personally dealt with or have witnessed colleagues dealing with include:

• Turnover of key project team members
• Client funding changing causing delays or cancellation of the project
• Major technology issues causing much rework or a near restart on the project
• Closure of the delivery organization leaving a project hanging

Again, these are big ones--ranging from a frequent issue for many project managers like losing key project resources to one I personally experienced in the form of my employer shutting down operations while I was duly serving a client on a project. That’s one I hope none of you ever have to experience (if you have, I offer you my deepest sympathy).

So, when the project isn’t going well or when the known gives way to the unknown, how do you cope? How do you stay on track and keep the current and future …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.