Keep Calm and Carry On

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   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

There will be times when you are dealing with an extremely stressed team, working long hours under a deluge of urgent deadlines and pressure. How you handle these situations, from acting as a buffer to conveying confidence, will have a huge impact on the outcome.

When a customer decided that they wanted to use one of their products to support a new marketing campaign, they wanted to move quickly. It generally takes four to six weeks to configure the product for a specific use case; we had four days — including Saturday and Sunday! We made it, and the campaign launched on time and to great success. In its first week, the campaign drive 50 percent more volume through the product than every other use case combined in the first eight months of the year — about a 5,000 percent increase in weekly activity. Clearly great news, but what about the impact on the people involved?

Projects like this significantly raise stress levels as team members absorb increases in workload, put in long hours and deal with the pressure to execute faster while still making no mistakes. In addition, new people who never cared about “normal” projects are suddenly calling multiple times a day to find out what’s happening and why it can’t happen even faster.

If you are a project leader, there will be times when you are dealing with an extremely stressed team. How…

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