Controlling the Emergency Project

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.

  PMO   Risk Management  

I recently had a situation that many project managers will face at one point or another. I got a phone call asking me to manage a new initiative that the organization had just approved that was incredibly aggressive. A business opportunity had been identified and there had to be extremely swift actions taken to take advantage of the situation. Work that would normally have taken weeks and months had to be initiated in hours and days, and once the process was started there was no stopping it.

As an example of what was at stake, there was an e-mail campaign promoting the initiative and the commitment to the campaign was given (including the URL) before the site had even been built. If the project was late, then around 1.5 million people (probably including some of you) would have got an e-mail directing them to an application that didn’t exist.

I don’t want to use this article to do a case study of the work that was done on that specific project; I want to look at it from a project process standpoint. This initiative couldn’t follow the organization’s traditional project methodology because the aggressive timelines would never have been met, but at the same time we couldn’t completely ignore the project processes that the organization had in place. We ended up making it up as we went, but it made me think that PMOs would benefit from …

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