4 Ways Your PM Career Sustainability Can Go Wrong
Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.
About a year ago, I wrote an article called Becoming a Sustainable Project Manager with an accompanying Sustainable PM Assessment. My hope at the time was that readers would understand the four sustainability drivers:
- Skills
- Lifestyle
- Relationships
- Stewardship
…and develop action plans on how to be more sustainable. To help underscore the importance of being sustainable, here are four stories where, for each person, sustainability wasn’t a priority.
1. Stan: The Staunch Waterfall Advocate
Stan had been a project manager for years, having a good track record of delivering several successful projects. A staunch waterfall advocate, Stan believed that the traditional requirements / design / implementation / verification / maintenance approach was the single source of truth when it came to project delivery.
Stan was re-orged into a new organization that had adopted agile as its methodology of choice. On his first assignment, Stan developed his project plan using the waterfall methodology and showed it to his project leads.
Tarek, the engineering lead, looked at the plan and snarked, “Stan, the 80s called and they want to congratulate you on your use of waterfall.”
Beth, the agile coach, was a bit more tactful: “Stan, we’ve adopted agile as our methodology of choice and have been using it successfully for a couple of …
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"When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us." - Alexander Graham Bell |
