I recently attended an interview for a PM position with a telecoms company. I am currently a junior PM and have spent the past year with a company that has few processes and a strong resistance to formal PM methodology and logic. And although recently PMP certified (ie. PMBOK still buzzing through my head), I found myself caught out with a question that I really should have been prepared for.
The question was:
You are managing an IT project and are contractually required to complete the project in one week's time. The IT Manager tells you that due to unforseen technical difficulties, the project will not be complete for at least another two weeks. There are no more resources (and you cannot outsource), what do you do?
My response in the interview was vague and based around speaking first to the project sponsor and then re-negotiating the contractual due date with the client.
Would anyone mind helping me with a more substantial response? Thanks in advance. Saving Changes...
It’s not an uncommon occurrence unfortunately. Simplistically I would suggest you consider those things that are under your control – time, cost and quality/scope. In a typical trade-off matrix you can only constrain one of these – eg. “To deliver in a fixed time, we will adjust the scope and accept the cost.” Anther such example might be “To deliver to a constrained cost, we will adjust the cost to what we are comfortable with and accept what scope can be delivered.” The rule of thumb here is that you can only constrain one item, adjust one item and accept the other. Another trade-off matrix uses the terms “constrain, optimise and accept.”
In the scenario you’ve mentioned there are two constraints that suggest to me you are in trouble. Number one you have a contractual commitment to make delivery by a certain date, number two your resources (costs) are constrained in terms of availability of additional resources. Nevertheless it almost matches the scenario of constrained time with adjusted resources (costs) and so we must accept the scope. Therefore my take on this is that they want you to discuss going to the client to negotiate de-scoping or staged delivery as an option.
For example you could reduce the scope and deliver only mandatory items. The client would expect a reduction in cost and wouldn’t get everything they want but it may be palatable to them if there was a legislative need to have the system in place by a certain date for example, and they could live without the bells and whistles.
More realistically you could negotiate a staggered delivery of the scope. Tested & “ready” functional items by launch date, followed by another release (or releases) of additional scope until the full scope is delivered.
Naturally there are naturally cost impacts with either option and there are definite implications depending on whether you have a “fixed price” or “time and materials contract.”
To be able to do any of this negotiation you would need to cognisant of the residual technical risk and therefore you would need to determine the confidence level of delivering even an interim scope – i.e. How many more “unexplained” issues await you?
In parallel, I’d also alert the company lawyers or company directors to a potential action arising under the project contract and keep them well informed of the actions taken and progress on a daily basis for the remaining days until the project is delivered.
Of course, there are a great number of assumptions behind this simplistic approach, which no doubt you will be aware of however I’m going to conclude this essay here.
