Project Rescue in the PMO

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.

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I was recently introduced to a PM who introduced themselves as an “expert in project rescue”. Fair enough. They then went on to explain that they had worked as part of the same organization for the last eight years, and while it was a company of several hundred people, it wasn’t huge. I was a little taken aback--was there really enough work for a “rescue expert” to be fully employed for that long in the same organization?

The PM knew what I was thinking, and he obviously had thought the same things himself--that the organization wasn’t learning from their mistakes or they would evolve to the point where project rescue wasn’t needed, or at least only required in rare circumstances. We had a long, interesting conversation and this article is the result.

Why do we need rescue?
The idea of project rescue isn’t new, but it has become more prominent in recent years. It’s the idea of parachuting a new PM onto a failing project in order to quickly turn things around--to address serious shortcomings in progress against milestones, deal with multiple issues, etc. It likely also requires different processes, acceptance of less structure and more risk--a case of doing whatever it takes to save the project.

It’s clearly something that has merit, but it’s a high-risk strategy. We all know that you don’t …

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