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Guerrilla Tactics (Part 2)

February 27, 2002

When the disruption from waves of layoffs and restructurings begin to wreak havoc on the performance of your workforce, it is time to respond with appropriate countermeasures. As we saw in Part 1, a four-part battle plan should keep you and your workforce ahead of the enemy. The battle plan revolves around "war room meetings," where risks to the project from restructuring are assessed and acted upon.

Battle Plan Part 1: Establish Project War Room Meetings
Remember that performance is compromised by the paranoia/fear and the tendency to procrastinate in decision-making and task completion. You may find yourself falling into the same trap. Project War Room Meetings, or whatever you prefer to name them, are designed to determine actions that will minimize these problems and focus worker energies on the appropriate work. In these meetings, project team representatives discuss current facts related to organizational disruption and their relationship to the viability of the project.

Why separate and distinct meetings? This meeting may very well be out of scope of routine meetings you have already set up, and there could be some controversy involved. Consider reducing the frequency of other routine meetings and integrating this meeting into the meeting schedule. Alternately, depending on the size of the project, you may incorporate some of these activities in any existing risk management or status meetings. The details below will help you to decide how to conduct these meetings.

Sponsor & Stakeholder Issues
By far the most important issues the project war room meetings should address are those related to the elimination or realignment of the project sponsor and/or stakeholders. Stakeholders, and even your sponsor, may disappear or change roles after departmental reorganizations and layoffs.  You need to track these changes closely.

• Maintain contact with stakeholders during organizational changes. Find out how their support (even their needs) for the project changes.
• Look for big potential breakdowns in processes you use when departmental reorganizations are announced. There may be serious repercussions to getting critical inputs, resources or feedback.  It is important to note that these situations may blow your issue resolution procedure out of the water. There may simply be no known resolution to these problems, nor anyone remaining who cares that you have that issue. Try not to take this personally.
• When the sponsor is eliminated, find out who is now in charge of your project. Ask the person who is in charge whether your project will continue, or whether other major changes are forthcoming. Ask point blank in a manner consistent with the success of your organization.

Other Issues
Even if all sponsors and stakeholders remain relatively stable (organizationally and psychologically), war room meetings have plenty of other issues to deal with. Participants in this meeting should:

• Be aggressive in investigations when layoffs or restructuring occur. Who is taking over this task now that the one assigned is gone? If someone is taking over the task, do they know it? (What do you think?) Are they working on it now? Has this person planned on attending regular project meetings? Is this person now doing the work of many others?
• Discuss lack of inputs needed for the project. Are these signals of a supplier that has disappeared or is no longer able to meet the needs of the project? What response is appropriate?
• Look for and assess restructuring and layoffs in customers, other departments, suppliers, etc. Your project may suffer indirect effects from "Other People?s Pain."
• Communicate lack of inputs and their effect on your project to stakeholders and sponsors. Ask if they have any insight into continued problems or whether schedule extensions are appropriate in this environment. Discuss comments obtained with war room meeting participants.
• Include discussions related to loss of project personnel. Assess how the loss is affecting the quality and schedule.
• Compile intelligence from the field (described in Battle Plan Part 2), and delegate to meeting members the tasks of getting elaboration, confirmation etc. from stakeholders, corporate rumor control lines and others in the know. Discuss responses and their ramifications to the project
• Discuss sponsor and stakeholder responses to your inquiries about the latest announcement of bad financials or other cost-cutting initiatives. Share the current facts and "gut feelings."
• Create appropriate communications to the project workforce to maintain performance. This is Battle Plan Part 3, to be detailed in the next installment of this series.
• Plan for early close-out or drastic project changes (more on this in the final installment of this series)

The Project War Room Meeting is your way to assess the latest corporate organizational news and determine the actions that will enable your project to succeed. For your meeting participants to be able to make the best decisions, though, you need to gather intelligence. The workforce will supply your agents. In turn, you need to keep these agents updated on any facts concerning the status of the project. You must also counter any misinformation. This will keep performance at a maximum and procrastination stored away. These parts of the battle plan will be covered in the next installment.   In addition, the next installment will deal with the sensitive topic of planning an early close out of the project.

Are layoffs or corporate reorganizations disrupting your workforce? What problems is this causing to your ability to manage your project? Go to my discussions area to share and get additional information.

Joe Wynne is the subject matter expert for gantthead's Workforce Management department.