The Extra Hours Trap

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.

  Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

As leaders we should never lose sight of the welfare of our team members, no matter how tight the deadline or stressful the workload. If our actions threaten their welfare then we need to seriously reassess the situation, or it will cost us in other ways down the line.

I recently observed a conversation between a project manager and program manager on a difficult project. The project manager said, “I got the email from them as soon as they finished the work — at 1:30 a.m. today.” The program manager responded, “Well, we’re all working hard to get this done. I don’t want to keep hearing about how late people are working.”

The response demonstrated a fundamental problem, one that is all too common. The program manager felt that working into the early hours of the morning had become “unremarkable” — after all, everyone was doing it. I don’t think that he was truly uncaring; it was simply the “new normal” for the program as things had slowly worsened during the course of the initiative. I am aware that many projects require overtime at some point, but it should never become the norm. In fact, this cuts to the heart of being a humanitarian leader — and it’s also good business.

The cost of not putting people first

In the Agile world there is a conscious effort not to think of …

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