PM Mind Games

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 recently had a conversation with a client that left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable. I was discussing a key deadline on a project with the client project manager and I said that logically it should be June 30^th, which this year happens to be a Thursday. Here in Canada, it is also the last day of the working week because July 1^st is a national holiday.

The individual I was talking to asked whether we could change the deadline from end of day on June 30^th to the start of business on July 4^th because “July sounds better than June.” Now from a practical standpoint, there is no difference—that’s the next working day, but the assumption that we should be playing these “games” with people concerns me on a number of different levels.

Firstly, the implication is that people don’t pay much attention to the project schedule and will therefore consider the two dates distinctly separate. I could maybe understand that if we were just talking about “June” versus ”July,” but with specific dates in place I feel this is underestimating the engagement (and intelligence) of the project team.

My second significant concern is that if this stakeholder has this attitude with regard to this simple deadline, he will likely maintain a similar attitude with other elements of the project, and other groups of people. It is very …

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