Leading Via a Workforce Skills Readiness Check
| Your project is on schedule until the Customer Service team reports that it cannot complete its design review tasks on time: those assigned lack the required skills. Up to this point, you have relied on functional group leaders, supported by a centralized training organization, to manage skill development. This gap catches you by surprise, and none of your available responses will keep the project on schedule. You now have to submit a status report you would rather not write. Automation, layoffs, reorganizations, and AI-driven process changes can make it more likely that workforce skills no longer match the needs of your project. Assuming available resources are ready increases delivery risk. You need to understand what causes readiness gaps and prepare your project to manage them. Some examples of causes of capability gaps
Add a Workforce Readiness Check to Your InitiationStart checking for capability gaps during initiation, in conjunction with your existing resource availability checks. Complete the readiness check before committing to timelines, budgets, and the business outcomes your project must deliver.
Delegate Readiness Analysis to Appropriate Functional LeadersYour job is to confirm project team readiness, not to conduct organizational workforce planning. Delegate the readiness analysis to the functional leaders and managers who normally oversee their teams’ readiness. Explain why they need to check for capability gaps and, if participation in your project process will be unfamiliar, describe how the team will work within it. You can incorporate this as part of routine stakeholder interactions.
Position Yourself as an Adaptable LeaderTracking schedule, cost, and scope performance alone does not tell you whether the workforce can perform the work ahead. In today’s volatile organizations, make workforce readiness a project success factor by integrating a readiness check into initiation. This adaptation helps you distinguish yourself as a project leader who prepares projects to succeed even in difficult circumstances.A future post will cover how to manage readiness problems during execution. |
Help Your Team Succeed as AI Reshapes Delivery
| AI is changing how work gets done, and project managers are often the first to see the effects in everyday delivery. Processes that used to work smoothly start to shift. Task ownership gets less clear. Dependencies slip in ways that are hard to predict. Many organizations still are not giving teams much guidance on how to adjust. That uncertainty does not just affect morale. It also affects delivery. When people are unsure how their work is changing or what is expected of them, timelines get harder to predict, handoffs get messier, and accountability can start to weaken. It also does not stay neatly inside one team. As partner teams and stakeholders adopt new tools at different speeds, coordination gets harder and dependencies become less predictable. Even a well-built project plan can start to drift when the work around it is changing. This is where your role becomes especially important. As a project manager, you do not need to have all the answers, but you can help your team stay clear, realistic, and coordinated as things shift around them. That kind of steady leadership matters more than ever when expectations, tools, and workflows are all evolving at once. The good news is that you do not need to become an AI expert to respond well. Your job is not to remove every uncertainty. It is to keep delivery steady through uncertainty by protecting clarity, flow, and accountability. The practical tactics below can help you do exactly that. Focus on Execution, Not Tools Most teams do not struggle because they lack AI tools. They struggle because the work around those tools has not been redesigned.
Manage Work at the Task Level AI rarely replaces an entire role, but it often changes how specific tasks get done. If you plan only at the role or department level, important shifts are easy to miss. Planning at the task level helps you keep ownership, timing, and dependencies clear.
Treat Skill Gaps as a Delivery Risk Many delays now come from assumed capability. The risk is not that people need to learn. The risk is assuming that learning will happen quietly in the background while delivery continues at the same pace.
Do Not Mistake AI Efficiency for Extra Capacity When AI reduces effort on some tasks, teams can develop expectations about an overall capacity increase. But adaptation adds its own friction: learning curves, tool switching, process changes, and extra coordination. If those costs are ignored, frustration and burnout can quickly undermine delivery. ·Track workload using simple indicators such as active tasks per team member, frequency of new tool adoption, and after-hours work.
Lead with Transparency Through Uncertainty AI adoption rarely happens at the same pace across teams, which makes forecasts more fragile than they may seem. When you treat those unknowns as settled, you create avoidable execution risk.
The Practical Takeaway There are a lot of details here, but they can all be summed up in one simple question to ask in every delivery planning session: Does this option reduce friction or add uncertainty? Many organizations are deploying AI without realizing much business value because execution has become unstable. This is where your role matters most. When you protect flow, clarity, and accountability, you help your organization turn AI potential into real outcomes. That may be exactly what leaders need, even if they do not yet realize it. |
Show an Explorer's Courage in Today's Work Environment
| Today's work environment can be challenging to say the least. While disruptive changes are continuing around you, how can you survive and thrive? One useful tactic is to keep a perspective that provides a foundation for your success and that of your team. Consider the perspective of explorers. Explorers accept uncertainty and challenges as part of the work environment. They even lead their team through these challenges. In an explorer’s world, preparation is important but sometimes situations require creativity to progress. When you take on the perspective of an explorer, you too can succeed when the going gets tough. An explorer shows courage in the face of uncertainty or risk. You as a project manager face the same challenges in the modern work environment. For example:
With overlapping changes that keep coming, you would be justified in having difficulty generating an explorer’s courage. But there is reason to be optimistic. Your previous experience in project management has given you important transferable skills.
You can show courage by changing your outlook and displaying openness to change. Change Your Outlook Sure, big disruptions are anxiety-producing, but you can still be ready to pivot into a major adjustment. Leaders and stakeholders are looking for someone who is part of the solution to the disruption, not a part of the problem. Your reaction is key. With your transferable skills and preparation, you can react with confidence. As a courageous leader you display openness to change and accept barriers and disruptions as a matter of routine. Display Openness to Change When change occurs, be curious.
Make Organizational Barriers and Disruptions Routine Explorers appear courageous when they take major barriers in stride. Explorers look over the unexpected landscape proactively with their team and determine how to move forward while others are paralyzed. To make disruptions routine,
This is what organizational leaders need in future project managers. The future holds more disruptions for organizations, and your ability to be courageous in the face of such disruptions will set you apart from the crowd. Look for more in the next post on thinking like an explorer, covering resilience in the face of disruptions. |
Facilitating Team When Given New Tight Budget Part 2
| Tight budgets can present a minefield for relationships between your team, the sponsor, and stakeholders. If you are able to negotiate this situation effectively, you can be successful in managing the project and be respected enough to handle larger, more complex projects. In the previous post, I covered how to make sure your team has a positive attitude going into budget risk analysis. Assuming that has occurred, you will be safe facilitating the next step, which is to complete the formal risk analysis. This post is not about the general process of risk analysis, but only guidance in handing the tight budget situation with your team. Keep the end in mind: You do not want the sponsor and other leadership to see you or the team as fearful and not suited to manage the effort. Instead, you want to communicate areas of concern in a thoughtful manner, assuming all involved are looking for a successful project outcome. A preliminary risk analysis would work just fine in this situation. Preliminary Risk Analysis: Identify Budget Busters Now it's time to let your team tell you what they are concerned about. Your facilitation will help put these concerns into concrete project risk language. Focus the discussion first on identifying those factors that will add more time than planned and thus cause an overrun of your project budget. It is easier to keep at least a couple of general categories in your mind to help project team members explain their concerns in more precise terms. The two used here are Complexity and Novelty. For the risk analysis examples used below, assume that the budget is low because the durations of phases were too short in the initial budgetary estimate, created prior to the project team being assigned. Address Complexity. Week after week, different types of delays can add time to complete activities. Complex projects mean more questions to address; more time for reviews, approvals and issue resolution. Consider:
Example Reporting Component. Inability to deliver new product by deadline due to expected longer duration to complete activities in most phases. The number and breadth of stakeholders involved, and the need to commit to their respective engagement requirements will add more time than previous projects to obtain input and approvals to proceed. Impact: Medium. Likelihood: High. Response/Mitigation: Document (1) effects of engagement processes and (2) early durations of issue resolutions and of obtaining approvals in order to estimate future activity durations more accurately. Address Novelty. More often than ever, brand new tools and processes are brought into the work environment that are disruptive to delivery expectations but also to the organization as a whole. Consider, for example:
Example Reporting Component. Inability to deliver new product by deadline due to expected longer duration to complete activities in most phases. Project team is not yet proficient in using tools recently rolled out and stakeholders have concerns over how the tools work. Issues may arise that cause delays. Impact: Medium Likelihood: Medium Response/Mitigation: Continue team training on new tools. Support stakeholder familiarization sessions for new AI tools. Document delays due to new tools and report significant to project. Prepare for a Compelling Presentation The next step is to write up your team's preliminary risk analysis. Choose a format that is formal, but without full rigor of standard reporting for your organization. Treat this as a helpful communication to your sponsor to raise awareness of factors that put your deadline at risk. It is better than immediately moving to the week-to-week reporting granularity that does not really capture the work environment as a whole. It's also important to communicate these risks early. It relieves some pressure on your team, and helps you achieve understanding and support when you need to make schedule adjustments, or when you hit previously mentioned delays. Finally, you just look like you are in control despite the chaos. |
Facilitating Team When Given New Tight Budget
| You have probably experienced the disappointment of realizing that the budget you are provided is very tight for what your team is being asked to do. You feel like you are at a disadvantage from the start. Maybe the sponsor is not fully aware of what is involved. The sponsor may have unrealistic expectations. You don't want inadequate funding to reflect badly on your team! It's easy to become demotivated at this point - IF you are not sure how to prepare for this situation. When you are assigned a tight budget, it's time to discuss it with your team in a positive and constructive way. Your team is a valuable asset and can help manage the situation. They can anticipate problems and help develop effective communications related to those problems.
Important Understanding of Your Project Budget Before speaking with your team, it is useful to have some background related to your project budget. If you are involved with or receive communications about organizational strategy, you may have detailed knowledge of how the budget was generated. You may have access to a business case that clarifies background and expectations. In other situations, you may only have a brief discussion with your sponsor to learn about the budget. Either way, this is good information to have before you discuss the budget with your team. The budget may be able to be increased with justification following an escalation process. Or it may be that the solution your team is delivering will not be worth the expense beyond your assigned budget (or something close). If this information can be shared with your team, it will serve as a basis for planning. It will also help the team feel connected to the strategy.
Address any Adversarial Attitude Once your project team finds out about a constrained budget, they will very easily fall into a frustrated “us” against “them” attitude. This will lead to unconstructive behaviors that will reduce performance and make the workplace less enjoyable, unless you take action. You can avoid the team getting into an adversarial attitude by facilitating conversations toward an approach that is positive and constructive. As you facilitate, maintain a positive attitude to lead by example, even if you feel the frustration strongly. Listen patiently to any complaints and redirect discussion toward these points:
Of course, you will adjust the detail of the above points based on the experience level of your team or individual team members. You can facilitate more experienced team members to persuade less experienced team members that it is possible to succeed even under a frustratingly low budget. Be ready to field questions or statements that are based in fear. Acknowledge that fear for the benefit of the team member and other team members. A team member may have been burned before in a project with a tight budget. Once the fear has been acknowledged, it is fine to move on to facts or possible actions. Do not give this facilitation step a quick pass. You don’t want to leave fear or resentment simmering in your team. Take the minutes necessary to air grievances and discuss opportunities. Once you have the team looking at the tight budget more optimistically, you can move on to the next step, identifying those factors that will tend to bust your project budget. With the team’s improved attitude, they should have energy to create a good list with the knowledge that they are promoting themselves while protecting the organizational strategy. This step of looking at budget risks will be covered in my next post. Don’t forget that you can also find my articles on this site. |
