Have you ever, as a project manager, tried to slow your team down?
Wade HarshmanScrum Master| GDITIndianapolis, In, United States
I'm just looking for personal experiences with this. It seems counter-intuitive for project managers, but I'd wager we have some real life examples from PMs on this forum. Maybe you needed to delay a deliverable for a customer, or perhaps you needed to coordinate work from different teams. Maybe you had an external dependency and you were at risk of getting ahead of it. Perhaps you were guarding your team from burnout. I'd like to know. Saving Changes...
Brandy TowardIT Support Manager| NM Admin Office of the CourtsAlbuquerque, Nm, United States
I've never had to slow down or delay the team as a whole but I have had to slow down individuals on a team on multiple occasions. The most regular occurrence for me is in regards to application developers/programmers. Often the developers will hear about an upcoming project (or even an idea for one) and want to start working on development before we even have a list of requirements or user needs. This is often counterproductive.
I've also had to slow down staff in regards to quality assurance testing because they were breezing through it so quickly that they weren't picking up on missing deliverables and/or errors. It's sometimes difficult to stress that quality is just as important as meeting deadlines. Saving Changes...
Maureen WilsonSenior Director of Research| Sugar Industry Research Division (formerly Sugar Industry Research Institute)Mandeville, Manchester, Jamaica
Sometimes it is necessary especially in large projects comprising of individuals/organizations from different countries. Once when funds from an international funding agency was late, it was necessary to slow down and actually stop some aspects of the project until funds were received. Another time, one of our international partners was late in getting the human resources in place, we had to delay start of some aspect of the work. Saving Changes...
Stéphane ParentSelf Employed / Semi-retired| Leader MakerPrince Edward Island, Canada
While being early is usually better than being late, the project team is supposed to produce the project deliverables on time, not under. Finishing earlier means you commandeered resources that could have been used elsewhere. Saving Changes...
