How Far Will You Go?

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   Resource Management  

When I saw that this month’s topic was around the human resources part of project management, I had a lot of ideas about what I could write. In fact, I had some trouble limiting the topics I wanted to offer some thoughts on, so in this article I am going to touch on three different scenarios and explore some of the things we can learn from them as “people leaders.” Each of these is a situation I’ve been a part of in some way, and all have stuck with me as personal lessons…hopefully they’ll also help you.

Enough is enough
Imagine the project from hell. Okay, you probably don’t have to imagine (we’ve all had them, haven’t we?). In this case, I was the PM and it seemed like everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. I couldn’t point to any one element of the project that had been done badly; it was just that circumstances had conspired to create every problem imaginable.

The team had been magnificent, always volunteering to stay late or work weekends to help the project recover—and never getting frustrated when yet another problem came up. By the time we got to the point where the end was in sight, the team was almost resigned to more weekend and evening work—and many had already rescheduled personal commitments, with the expectation they would be working.

Of course one of the last major …

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