Crunch-Time Casualties

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.

  Decision Making   Risk Management   Scope Management   Talent Management  

I was recently talking to someone who was facing a genuine crisis on their project. She was the project manager for an initiative that was part of a major program, and her project was downstream of most of the work. Inevitably, that meant that any delays or issues earlier in the program impacted her because deliverables were delayed without any shifting of the final completion date. This left her project with just as much work, but less time to do it.

Once she was able to start her work, things didn’t get any better. The earlier program deliverables that should have been inputs to her initiative were incomplete, inaccurate and at times just missing. She tried to raise the issue, but it made little difference--earlier projects were too busy trying to deflect blame and program stakeholders just wanted the program to deliver on time regardless of what that took to achieve.

As a result, her team found themselves having to try and complete the work on the inputs to their project just so they could start their own tasks. This is clearly a far-from-ideal situation; it meant that team members were working on things that wasn’t part of their job, that they weren’t fully competent or competent executing. If that wasn’t enough, the team was also under intense pressure to get things done so that they weren’t perceived as the group responsible for …

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