Pushing Back Is Leadership

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Project managers must also be leaders within their organizations — after all, a major part of your role is to make sure that the right things are being done in the right way to maximize the chances of the enterprise achieving its goals. And to do this, you can’t blindly follow what you know is wrong.

Someone I have never met e-mailed me a couple of weeks ago asking for advice on a project he was managing. Without getting into the gory details, an implementation project had been set up to fail. Unrealistic promises had been made to the client about what the product could do, timelines had been committed to that could never be met, and the new version of the product wasn’t ready for production but was still being sold.

Nine months into what should have been a four-to-six month project and the predictable outcome had occurred: an unhappy client and a project that was nowhere near completion, with internal teams that were blaming one another and had lost any pretense of working together. More worryingly, the project manager’s health was suffering through the stress.

The PM had raised concerns about the project early on, but had been directed to continue because it was important for political reasons — the company needed to get a client on the new product version and be able to claim that the project was a success, and sales had already been paid …

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