Your Project Isn’t Failing Because of Scope or Stakeholders
Project managers have to manage the standard levers - scope, budget, schedule and quality. These determine the outcome and benefits. Most of the time, the project starts well, though it may be shaky. Then you start hitting challenges.
Despite all your efforts and attention to detail, the project is slowly slipping away. Deadlines are eroding, stakeholders are becoming more demanding and difficult, and quality drops. As project managers, we’re taking the brunt of this. We spend longer hours in the office at the expense of time with our family and personal life, to fix this. You start managing the details, asking for more information, and micro-managing the team.
You look for scope creep, poor requirements, underestimation or missed dependencies. These are all valid reasons why your project is slipping. And they may be the cause, but they are most likely the symptom rather than the root cause. You’re getting the incomplete picture. What is missing is the root cause, the ‘thing’ that is leading to these technical issues of scope, poor requirements.
Your project is slipping not because of poor requirements, stakeholder mismanagement, or scope creep. It’s slipping because of the weight of unresolved leadership decisions.
You’re working harder to fix things that are not causing the issues. You’re not a bad project manager or leader. You’re not seeing the invisible thread that is holding your project together, slowly unravelling. Leadership issues can show up as delivery problems. Leadership is the invisible thread.
For example, you see missed deadlines, and the teams might say that the upstream component team did not provide their code in time or that the quality is low. What this is really about is unclear ownership.
Another example, you see teams not being proactive or waiting for permission. What it may be saying is that there is low trust in receiving support, or a weak intent or orientation towards the outcome.
Another way to describe leadership issues is to call them debts - the decisions not made, the ownership that wasn’t clarified, the avoided conversations. This all accumulates quietly at first, and the pressure piles on the project team.
Project managers end up carrying the pressure. They carry it because they’re responsible for delivering; they’re trying to take ownership when others won’t. They’re compensating. Project managers have high responsibility and limited authority. You have to get things done.
You’re working harder, stress is mounting, and you’re driving the teams, yet delivery remains challenging.
The first step is to understand where the invisible thread is woven through the project.
Instead of asking technical questions, “What are the risks? What is wrong wth the plan?”
Ask leadership-oriented questions like “Where are the decisions not being made? Where are the responsibilities unclear or overlapping? What are the conversations that are not happening?”
Leadership challenges can feel overwhelming, especially when you feel they rest with your senior stakeholders.
But leadership challenges are solvable: people can be influenced and persuaded, trust can be built, and behaviour can be changed.
Actions
Below are a few steps you can take to improve leadership debt on your project.
Begin by being self-aware - what are the underlying leadership issues that are causing the challenges?
Ask the questions:
Where are the decisions not being made?
Where are the responsibilities unclear or overlapping?
What are the conversations that are not happening?
Is the intent or goal clear and tangible?
Develop your influencing and persuasion skills. There are numerous courses and books that teach you how to manage upwards and influence senior stakeholders, have difficult conversations and communicate bad news.
Learn how to make decisions. Decision-making isn’t a gut feeling. A lot of it is implicit processes in your mind. Understand how you make decisions, call out your biases and assumptions, and think through the impact of your decisions.
Practice
Ask yourself one of the questions above. Review your answers and develop an action plan to help you resolve it or move it one step closer to resolution.
Drop me a note and let me know how it goes.
Resources
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
We think we have all the information, but many of our project decisions are based on imperfect information.
Annie Duke’s book will help you in decision-making using the poker paradigm.
My Resources
Below are some of my free resources if you’re new to project management.
Templates
Paid Resources
Simple and Effective Project Risk Management is for those new to project management, the accidental project manager and experienced PMs wanting to learn something new. It will teach you what you need to know and get you started quickly. I’m running a promotion where the first 10 people who buy this get a discount, pay only $19, and can book a 30-minute coaching call with me.
Some of my articles that you may find useful.