Teachable Moments: Being Transparent with Project Sponsor Earns Trust

Raj Jhajharia, PMP, is a Petroleum Engineer and a graduate of the Indian School of Mines. He previously worked in India with the ONGC (as Production Engineer) and Oil India Ltd. (as Reservoir Engineer). With a career containing a rich mixture of Petroleum Engineering, Project Management, Risk Management and Information Technology experiences, Raj has worked with Abu Dhabi National Oil Co in UAE since 1981. He is currently overseeing the Risk Management of Oil & Gas assets of the ADNOC Group. Check out his blog, Living Lively, where he shares his thoughts on various topics of general interest.

 

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

Some years ago, I was managing a large project involving many stakeholders and a team comprised of members from different operating companies. The project was to develop a competency framework for various IT roles among all the operating companies in order to induct fresh IT graduates into the workforce.

I worked with my team to develop a project charter and project plan following all principles of project management and incorporated our past experiences. When the entire team was happy with both documents, I submitted them to the project sponsor and obtained his formal approval.

One week after the formal issue of the project plan, we happened to discuss our plan with a visiting subject matter expert. He pointed out that we had underestimated the time required for the activity of developing knowledge and evidence criteria for each of the identified competency elements. There was no way we would complete the project by the planned completion date.

I discussed this matter with the team and we considered …

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