Temporary Project Leadership

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.

  Leadership   Talent Management  

A project manager I have known for some time came to me last week looking for some advice. One of her colleagues has been forced to take a medical leave of absence and is probably going to be away for about six months. This project manager was asked to take over her colleague’s project on a temporary basis (it will be running for another couple of years). She is comfortable with managing the work, but is less sure about managing the people. While the organization is nominally matrixed so team members all have their own functional managers, the long duration of the project and the exclusive use of dedicated resources effectively means the staff report to the PM.

When it was realized the original PM would have to leave, there was some consideration given to having staff report back to their functional manager for the duration of the absence. However, it was ultimately decided it would be less disruptive to maintain the model of effective reporting to the project manager, minimizing the disruption for the project team. I think that was the right decision, but it is the heart of the challenge the “replacement” project manager faced. Let’s consider the situation she found herself in.

There was no opportunity for handover from the permanent project manager so she was going into the project “blind.” She had experience with the business area so…

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