The ‘Right’ Way vs. The Proper Way

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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Topics: Governance, Organizational Project Management, Resource Management

I know a project manager who operates in a very difficult environment. She is extremely capable at her job, has a lot of respect from her teams and can always be relied upon to deliver a successful outcome. However, the individual she reports to—and who is a key stakeholder or sponsor for virtually every project—is not very capable, struggles to understand the work being performed, micromanages to try and compensate for his lack of comprehension, and introduces frequent, inappropriate change in response to his own boss (who shows many of the same traits).

As you might imagine, this creates a number of challenges for the PM. She finds herself acting as a “shock absorber,” protecting the team from as much of the uncertainty, irrelevance and error happening at higher organizational levels, while needing to aggressively manage the information reaching management levels on the progress of each project.

That is not only a highly stressful environment, it is potentially at odds with the way the organization expects her to operate. So is this okay? Can rules be bent in an attempt to get to the right outcome, or is this project manager behaving inappropriately? That’s what I want to consider in this article…

Role expectations—and reality
Let’s start with something simple: the expectations of the role of project manager. …

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