PM as Problem Solver

Vincent is a Senior Project Management Consultant and e-Learning Developer.

  Decision Making   Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Problems, problems everywhere — especially for the project manager. Whether your troubles are related to the triple constraint, stakeholders, team members, technical issues or something else, you have to truly understand the problem before you can solve it. Here is a field-tested three-step process to problem solving.

Murphy’s Law maintains that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. A corollary to Murphy’s Law states that Murphy was an optimist. It seems likely that Murphy was also a project manager!

There are three interrelated skills every project manager must possess: risk management, decision making and problem solving. Risk management is about potential problems and problem solving frequently requires making a decision. We’ve talked about risk management and, most recently, decision-making; here we’ll look into problem solving.

From the time you’re assigned to a project you start dealing with problems. Many will be addressed as you plan the project, while others will be surprises that you have to deal with during execution. Problems come in all sizes and shapes, and some are unique to different environments and project types. But there is a lot of commonality.

Many problems will be associated with the triple constraint. In high tech we frequently struggle to meet the latest requirements. They are well defined and …

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