Excuses, Excuses! Managing the 'Yeah, but...' PM

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 am sure that most of you will be able to relate to this situation--you work with your project team to plan your work or to get an update on the status of work, and one person always has a situation that is completely unique and prevents them from being able to deliver the information that you need. I think of it as the “Yeah, but…” factor--as in “Yeah, but it’s not as simple as that because this is different…” or “Yeah, but I don’t think you understand how difficult it is to answer that…”

Of course when you get past one barrier then there’s another one--there will always be another reason why the team member just doesn’t believe that it’s possible to give you the information that you are asking for in the way that you need it. So how do we deal with this situation without damaging the relationships within the team?

What’s really going on?
Before we try and solve the problem we need to understand what’s really going on. Of course everything we do is somewhat unique, but very rarely are we at the point where we can’t make a reasonable assessment of how long something will take, what progress we have made, what the costs are likely to be, etc.

What’s probably happening is that the team member who is throwing out objections is lacking in confidence on …

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