A Slippery PM Slope

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.

  Governance   Leadership   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

When poor project management behaviors go unchecked, they eventually become the new norm. Pushing through a customer request without regard for change controls, or skipping weekly risk reviews, might work out OK in the short term, but it will cost an organization over time.

I was recently asked to carry out an assessment of project management in a medium-sized company that had about 30 project managers who carried out about 100 projects a year that were considered large enough to get attention from leadership. They were delivering generally good results, but they were concerned that they hadn’t done much to improve the way projects were executed in recent years, and they also felt they had underinvested in governance.

I immediately detected a high degree of tension between project managers and their team members, stakeholders and the PMO. Relationships with team members seemed strained at best, with very little open communication but lots of management by deliverable — discussions around why deliverables were behind or mistakes had happened, and so on. Relationships with stakeholders seemed to be little more than the distribution of status reports with follow-up questions from stakeholders seen as an inconvenient interruptions. Perhaps worst of all, the relationship between project managers and the PMO was virtually non-existent. There were no regular meetings, …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.