The Old “Resistance To Change” Dodge
| One of the most dangerous failure modes to afflict Project Management Offices (PMOs) is easily identifiable by its post-mortem analysis, if that analysis is articulated in such a way as to place the First, let’s stipulate that, in order to advance, well, any capability within the macro-organization, we’re really looking at two distinct but related problems: (1) how to identify the optimal (or even workable) technical solution, and (2) formulating its accompanying implementation strategy. If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a dozen times: a new PMO Director will come in full of confidence that the management strategies with which they are familiar will certainly work in this new environment, if only the staff will follow instructions. If (when) those strategies fail, then the fault must have been due to “resistance to change” on behalf of that same staff, the organization beyond the PMO personnel, or some combination of the two, since the exact same technical approach worked so well previously, dontcha know. The reason for the failure is virtually never perceived as the PMO Director’s inability to identify the optimal technical solution in a novel situation, or a viable implementation strategy. This managerial conceit is toxic to the PMO’s technical agenda, and potential for success. The good news, though, is that it can be avoided with a few basic concepts included in the original approach to advancing the PM capability. I want to break these basic concepts down into two bins: one for managerial leadership, and the other for executing the implementation strategy. GTIM Nation regulars know of my three rules for effective managerial leadership: 1.The effective manager-leader must be advanced enough to identify the optimal technical approach in the current environment. Recycling old strategies without proper consideration of their appropriateness in the new organization is an invitation to PMO crash-and-burn. 2.The effective manager-leader must care about the personnel in their organization. If you don’t care about your people, they will quickly pick up on it, and they won’t care about you – or your technical agenda (no matter how well-developed) – either. 3.The effective manager-leader must have sufficient confidence in the selected technical agenda that, even if they were to find themselves without a supporting organization, they would pursue that agenda anyway. Let’s add these three ground rules to the ones for developing an implementation strategy. True to the title of this blog, they were derived from Game Theory. Without going into the details, the distilled take-aways are: 1.Make the actual participation level involved in advancing the capability falling-off-a-log easy to do. If the needed level of support for advancing the targeted capability is minimal (or even non-existent), then any opposition to such change has nothing to push against. 2.For those whose active participation is required, if they fail to do so, don’t just notice. Do something about it. Call them out, put them on the spot, challenge them, use their previous words of support to remind them … whatever, just don’t let it slide. “Retaliate” is a bit harsh of a term, but if withheld needed participation goes without response, then your implementation strategy will fail to the pathologies of the Silent Veto, or the Slow Roll. 3.If those from whom you need participation are participating, but their data is sub-standard, they’re golden. Better data can be far, far more easily achieved than cooperation where it’s absent. Incorporating these elements into your leadership and implementation strategies all but removes any legitimate “resistance to change” phenomena in the macro-organization, leaving only those elements within the team who will oppose you on the most specious of grounds. The optimal (or even a workable) technical approach, coupled with an implementation strategy tailored specifically to the macro-organization, and rolled out in such a way as to minimize the additional effort needed to achieve it removes almost all of the rational bases cited in all of those articles and columns on how to deal with such resistance, just without the avalanche of psychobabble that’s often attached to them. Essentially, resistance to change is baked into the organizational cake. Blaming it for any given PMO’s demise is analogous to attributing the loss of a football game to a bunch of players in different uniforms preventing your team from scoring. PMs that understand this will see a much greater success rate. PMs that don’t will blame “resistance to change” in the post-mortem analysis. |
Posted on: June 18, 2026 09:53 PM
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John Connor, PMP®
| Yes, yes, I know that this blog’s title has some explaining to do, primarily along the lines of “Are we really going to start awarding honorary PMP®s to fictional characters?”, along with “Well, if we are, why on earth would we start with the protagonist from The Terminator movies?” I can explain. For those members of GTIM Nation who were born after 1984 (the first reference to John Connor, even though he does not actually make an appearance) or after 1991 (his first actual appearance, in the sequel Terminator 2, Judgement Day), John Connor is the person that leads (will lead?) the humans in their ultimately successful counter-offensive to Skynet and its killer robots, known as Terminators, after they have turned the world into a violent, dystopian nightmare. As Connor and his forces close in on Skynet, it sends some of these killer robots back in time in order to stop Connor from being conceived in the first place (The Terminator), or growing out of adolescence (Terminator 2, Judgement Day). As with several movie franchises that feature time travel, other “futures” with different ultimate outcomes crop up; but, in at least one of the timelines, Connor is successful in either preventing Skynet from coming on-line in the first place or, having come on-line and nearly destroying humanity, leading the forces that finally, well, terminate it. Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World… I have to snicker whenever I see Project Managers listed among the professions that are considered likely candidates for replacement by Artificial Intelligence, or AI. As GTIM Nation knows, my particular management science take on the Pareto Principle is that the 80th percentile best managers who have access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20th percentile worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed. So, with critical PM-oriented information streams becoming more and more commonplace even as they are getting easier to generate, that means that even an asset manager will be able to make the optimal PM decisions on a consistent basis in the near future, right? Well, no. Notice that I’m not even attempting to speculate on the outcome of a 100% information available scenario. That’s because it doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t exist because the future cannot be quantified, despite the risk managers’ (no initial caps) attempts to do just that. As Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”[i] The difference between these two seemingly identical terms is filled by the PM. We PMs refer to the original plan as the baseline – scope, cost, and schedule, the notorious Triple Constraint – but I have yet to encounter a baseline that either remained unchanged throughout the Project’s life cycle, or accurately captured all of the variances that the Project would encounter. This is because those baselines are static, whereas actual Project execution is a highly dynamic process. The baselines are indispensable when it comes to measuring cost and schedule performance, but they simply can’t capture the events and changing circumstances that emerge that create a barrier to successfully attaining the particulars in the scope baseline on-time, on-budget. Add to that the fact that, even with 80% of the information needed, a workable decision or strategy is by no means guaranteed, let alone the optimal one. Hindsight is 20/20 goes the cliché, due to the fact that managerial decisions are almost always made with incomplete information at the time they need to be executed. Making key decisions with incomplete information is the stock and trade of PMs everywhere and, if those decisions stand the test of time – which is to say, they still make sense even after all of the relevant information is made available – then that PM’s judgement is shown to be sound. But enough of evaluating this on management science theory grounds – how does this appear in the And so, for demonstrating that AI doesn’t stand a chance against a human in a dynamic environment (even in a fictional setting), I would like to nominate John Connor for an honorary PMP®. Do I hear a second? [i] Retrieved from https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/ on June 2, 2026, 20:09 MDT. |
Posted on: June 08, 2026 11:27 PM
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George Jetson, Bring Me A Rock!
| The Jetsons was an animated situation comedy by Hanna-Barbera, aired originally in 1962, but set one-hundred years into the future, in 2062. Where The Flintstones was set in the Stone Age, The Jetsons was its futuristic counterpart, and depictions of how the titular family lived were both colorful and fanciful. The family’s patriarch, George, worked (will work?) for Spacely Sprockets, where his job appeared primarily to arrive at work (via flying car, of course), take a moving sidewalk to his control panel/desk, and press a single button. If the reason why George was uniquely qualified for this task was mentioned, I don’t remember it (and, just for the record, I was too young to watch it when it first aired – I saw it in reruns). Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World… Efforts to more fully integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the PM world have some level of fascination for me. Make no mistake – I am absolutely not an AI alarmist, but I can see a certain scenario unfolding that would make us PMs’ lives harder, and it has to do with this idea that critical information streams can be had rather simply, simply because technology is advancing. After all, if the readily-available AI bots out there can write up a believable Baseline Change Proposal or Variance Analysis Report, how much harder could it be to produce more complex, enterprise-wide PM documents and reports? Here is where The Jetsons and the traditional “bring me a rock” exercises come together. Quick reference: a “bring me a rock” exercise is when a superior in your organization wants you to produce a certain thing, but their scope definition is, shall we say, wanting. You take your best shot at delivering what you believe your superior has requested, only to learn that what you produced is certainly not meeting expectations. The dead giveaway that you are in a BMAR cycle is when the requestor can’t be any more specific about what it is that they desire. You leave the presentation upbraided and frustrated, without really knowing why, and needing to come up with some other You see, plenty of these “enterprise” systems promise highly valuable information streams at (almost literally) the touch of a George Jetson-esque button. The problem is that the specific information streams that are held to be highly valuable vary from manager to manager, organization to organization. For example, consider the numerous sources needed to generate an informed facility resource plan for the next, say, fiscal quarter: ·Available resources, both human and non (payroll, inventory, facility management system, etc.), ·Programmatic load (General ledger, scheduling system), ·Anticipated programmatic load (contract backlog, proposal backlog), ·Gap analysis of the existing programmatic load to the existing resource profile (the previous bullet’s data, plus HR [projected adds] and facility capacity), ·Gap analysis of the projected programmatic load and projected resource capacity, …among many others. There is simply no way any one computer program could synthesize this information stream reliably, even if it could successfully crawl all of the data sources it would need, which is itself unlikely. Keep in mind that this is just one product that would be expected out of an enterprise-wide system. If one were to add in other, more complex information-starved decisions (such as whether or not to respond to Request for Proposals on scope that is similar, but not identical to, the existing portfolio), and the highly improbable nature of such a comprehensive Information Technology program becomes clearer. And those issues manifest even before other, more fundamental ones would have to be definitively resolved. For example, ask a typical PM how to generate an Estimate at Completion, and she will likely respond “Easy! Divide the Cost Performance Index into the Budget at Completion.” Pose the same question to a member of the same organization’s Finance and Accounting department, and he will likely respond “Easy! Take the average monthly cost expenditures for that Project, normalize it by the number of working days in each month, and then project that figure out for the remainder of the period of performance.” Each is likely to be supremely confident that their way is the right one (though the F&A fellow shouldn’t be); but, unless this enterprise system has been told how to approach this particular data processing point, it’s going to generate an “answer” that is only useful to a fraction of the macro-organization. So, here’s my ultimate take-away: if your organization has been sold on some software company’s promises of an on-demand, reliable, all-encompassing information stream that renders their high-level decisions intuitively obvious, step back, take a breath, and ask: “Can you be a little more specific about what, exactly, that output looks like?" |
Posted on: May 28, 2026 12:44 AM
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How To Obstruct A PMO
| I believe one of the most difficult barriers to PMO success lands squarely in the organizational behavior and performance realm. You’re not failing to advance PM in your organization because its basic principles are invalid – in many cases, it’s because others in the macro-organization are dead-set against it, but can’t articulate their reasons out in the open, lest they be exposed as charlatans and Jungle Fighters[i]. So, if they need desperately to slow or even stop altogether your PM-maturing initiatives, but can’t say so (or why) out in the open, what are they to do? Well, obstruct, of course. How does this devious obstruction take place? How is the honest PMO Director to recognize it? Fortunately, the obstructionists themselves are often rather thick, and their tactics are readily uncovered. Unfortunately, even the thickest of them, wielding highly disingenuous tactics, will often find traction, particularly among others within the organization that, for various reasons, do not want an effective PMO in-place. What follows is a partial list of some of the more common obstructionists’ tactics. ·The Silent Veto. This occurs when the executives, managers, and actual workers will tell you to your face that they’re all on-board with your attempts at advancing PM maturity within the organization – but, in reality, they are absolutely set against it. So, when it comes time for them to do something other than offer verbal support in a meeting, you know, actually do something, even if they’ve stated clearly that they will – they just don’t show up. ·The Silent Veto’s near-cousin is the Slow Roll. Years ago, when I was a columnist for PMNetwork magazine, one of the other columnists was the brilliant Bud Baker, who would go on to become a Professor Emeritus at Wright State University’s Business School. He was helping me with my first book, Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong (PMI Publishing, 2008) when he told me about this technique. Like the Silent Veto, people will tell you to your face that they think you’re doing the right thing, and will also promise to help. However, in this variant they actually do help – just not enough to get you to a point where your advancement doesn’t retreat at the first sign of resistance. It’s almost as if these members of the organization know exactly how much energy is needed to get you to the next level, and will deliberately provide a fraction of it. That way no one can accuse them of enacting the Silent Veto, even though the results are exactly the same. ·The less-devious opposition members will often claim that even basic PM techniques are prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. Essentially, they’re saying the information streams being generated aren’t worth the problems involved in gathering the necessary data. Few things will scare off willing participants faster than the notion that they will be expected to work harder for limited – or even no – additional rewards. Now, GTIM Nation is aware that I maintain that every manager of a Project does basic Earned Value analysis, whether they’re aware of it nor not. Here’s my proof: on any job, if you are informed that you are half-spent, what’s the first thought that enters into your mind? Is it not, “am I half-done?” At that moment, an Earned Value analysis has been performed. Basic PM techniques aren’t difficult nor expensive, and any assertion to the contrary is indicative of another agenda in-play. ·If you do successfully navigate the juice-not-worth-the-squeeze gambit, its evil opposite may well make an appearance. This obstruction is based on the (equally idiotic) notion that, even if the sought-after cost and schedule performance information didn’t come at too-dear a price, it still isn’t worth it, because the accountants have the cost side of things covered, and their milestone lists or action item logs are sufficient for managing the schedule. But of all of the Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rules of Management, I am most confident in the one that states that there is no cost performance possible without earned value, and only very poor schedule performance possible without critical path (interestingly, a crude but very usable schedule performance information stream can be derived from Earned Value alone, but that’s a subject for a future post). As with the earlier example of performing an EV analysis almost automatically, the percent complete data point is central to any and all Project-related performance measurement. Self-identifying PMs who eschew even basic cost and schedule performance management have either already experienced huge delays and overruns, or they will in the near-to-mid future. Obstructionism within the macro-organization has to be one of the most frustrating barriers to advancing PM capability (or any capability, for that matter), and there’s really no universally-applicable method for overcoming it. I’m beginning, though, to understand why Machiavelli advised the new prince to do away with all of the former prince’s courtiers – institutional obstructionism is not new, but it was dealt with far more severely hundreds of years ago. Maybe I’ll go back and re-read The Prince. [i] Maccoby, Michael, The Gamesman, Bantam Books, 1978. |
Posted on: May 18, 2026 11:36 PM
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Rage, Rage Against The Dying Of The Project
| Projects, by definition, have a discernible beginning and ending date (quick PM hack: each of the Work Breakdown Structure elements, by extension, should also have a discernible beginning and ending date, Rolling Wave/Planning Packages excepted. Otherwise, you probably have a Function or Organizational Breakdown element on your hands, which DOES NOT belong in the WBS). As your Project’s end date approaches, a whole new set of managerial challenges present themselves, and, if they are mis-managed, future successes may very well become more difficult to achieve. But first, a quick evaluation of Matrix Management. Erik Francis, in cloudbees.com[i], actually refers to Matrix Management as a “fad,” one of the top management fads of the century[ii], in fact. And he’s not alone – I’ve seen Matrix Management show up on other business writers’ list of “management fads.” I think this is rather unfortunate, and points to a certain insensitivity (if not ignorance) of some of the essential elements that project-dependent organizations must integrate into their business models if they are to succeed, or even survive. For those new to the concept, Matrix Management asserts that each employee who charges to a specific project (or projects) essentially reports to two managers: the PM, and the “line” manager. This latter is responsible for the employee’s career track, and includes, among other things (like training), that employee’s “coverage,” or where he or she will charge their time. I would argue that this is a natural, holistic division of managerial authority and responsibility in organizations with a sizeable project portfolio. It leaves PMs free to focus on, well, PM stuff, like completing the scope on-time, on-budget, without having to worry about things like where their mid-level engineers rank in relation to the organization’s other engineers when it comes time for performance evaluations. Your typical PM has no idea how other Projects’ personnel are performing, and would, therefore, have no valid basis of comparison. However, those engineers’ Line Manager would know, or could more readily find out. But where Matrix Management really comes into its effectiveness is when a given Project is nearing its completion. In organizations with a large or expanding contract backlog, transitioning personnel to new Project work is usually straight-forward, assuming that their new Projects do not try to pull them too early, and endanger the successful completion of the Project they are working in its end-stages. But in organizations with a static – or even declining – contract backlog – these transitions become much more problematic. I’m reminded of the old Mr. Magoo cartoons, where the title character is functionally blind, but doesn’t know or acknowledge it. He believes he is taking a stroll through a park when he is, in fact, walking along a steel beam that is being craned into position many stories above the city streets below. Just as Mr. Magoo seems to step off of the flying beam, another comes along in mid-air, just under his next step, so seamlessly that he still believes himself to be in a park at ground-level. Alas, such transitions are extremely rare in the PM world, as key personnel will almost invariably be perceived as leaving their nearly-completed Project too early, or arriving at their next Project late. Then we have the Project Team members who have not been identified as “key,” but who are, nevertheless, rather talented. They, too, see the scheduled end-date of the Project approaching, but have not been informed by their Line Manager of their next assignment, leaving them to wonder if they have a future in the organization at all. The more capable ones will typically begin to explore their other options as the dreaded end-date approaches and no in-company options are presented, making them, as talented as they are, “flight risks.” Many organizations with large Project portfolios will seek to mitigate this effect by hiring sub-contractors, who tend to make per hour than the regular employees, but are more easily dismissed. However, this practice only mitigates the problem – it doesn’t solve it. Ultimately, in organizations that depend on Project work but are experiencing a decline in contract backlog, Projects in their end-stages generate a great deal of organizational angst. A sort of death spiral may manifest, where uncovered workers are laid off, leading to a loss of talent and, therefore, capability, which then causes a further erosion of the organization’s ability to win more work. Such organizations may seek to ramp up their proposal backlogs, but the win rate is an unforgiving element in this formula. So, with apologies to Dylan Thomas, I would wrap by saying Good PMs, whose follow-on proposal the client did reject, See their successes utterly fall away. Rage, rage against the dying of the Project. [i] Retrieved from https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/top-6-management-fads-this-century on April 6, 2026, 19:46 MDT. [ii] Ibid. |
Posted on: April 08, 2026 10:13 PM
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