All posts by : Savi

I have been promoted recently from a project support role in our PMO team to a full Project Manager role. In my new role I have been put in charge (as the sole Project Manager!) of a project to replace our very dated Call Centre management system with a replacement that will be linked to our customer website with things like web chat and web forms.  All this new tech will be a huge change for a lot of staff, as well as customers.

My big problem is that that the brief for this project is incredibly loose, and goes something like:

“Create a process for tendering for potential new suppliers and selecting the right one. Then create a working group to work with the new supplier and deploy the new system to all 60 users, while linking it to our website to make the new website tools available to customers. Oh, we’ve also promised the Board lots of time-saving benefits in our Business Case to fund the project, so make sure those benefits actually materialise as well”

To say I am out of my depth would be like saying the sun is a bit hot.  

For a start, I have never run a tendering exercise in my life and have no idea where to start. Do I just Google for potential suppliers like I’m buying a coffee machine? How do I compare one against the other, except on price, and how to I make sure they are not under-quoting to get the business, and will charge more later? Who should make the decision on which one we buy?

Even presuming we don’t mess that up, how do I know what’s involved in the deployment, integrations, testing and go-live? How long will it take? Do I just expect the supplier to tell me how to do everything?  That feels pretty risky, especially if things start to go wrong.

Also, there’s already talk the new system will remove the need for some jobs. What if the Call Centre teams don’t like it and don’t want to put the time in to test it? And where are all these time-savings going to come from, and what if none appear? Not all new systems magically save staff time just because they are new.

To be honest, I feel panicked when I think about it all, and I am wondering whether I should tell my boss I can’t do this project. That wouldn’t do my career any good, but it could be a lot better than getting this project wrong at every stage.

Help me Savi, any advice at all will be really welcome!

Totally Out of my Depth

I (33F, she/her) I’m pretty new to being a Project Manager after years in more of an admin role. I’m not super-experienced at running meetings and I’m finding it difficult to deal with people who either stop me to ask about things I’m going to cover later (clearly set out on my agenda, I might add), or want to raise something only vaguely related, and then spend precious time on that.

The result is that my project meetings aren’t as effective as they should be, and I worry I risk losing respect from people. Or maybe that’s the problem in the first place.

For instance, I was doing an important kick-off meeting last week where I had done a lot of preparation. I was only a minute into opening the meeting, when one of the managers interrupted to ask me about whether her team members were required on the project as they were already busy, which went down a rabbit hole for at least ten minutes.

Because I’m still quite junior as a PM, and I don’t want to upset people, I always try to stay pleasant throughout these interactions, no matter how irritating.

As I say, this is giving me some self-esteem issues, where I worry I’m not being taken seriously, and if I’m really cut out to be a PM. After all, being able to manage meetings is a big part of the job (I think).

Sometimes I feel like people really need a lesson in good manners, but obviously the change has to come from me.

Tired Junior PM 

Our whole team is writing to you here. In protest! Not against you (!) but against our current supplier.

We will save their shame by not naming them here. But we have all come to the point where we are having regular internal discussions about walking away and pausing the project to go find another agency to rescue us and our project out of chaos.

As our subject line says, NOTHING we receive in development to test has anywhere near the Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y …quality…. we asked for in our RfP or expected when we set out the vision for the project.

And it’s a website. Not that it would be different for our internal systems as we respect our internal teams and what they need daily. But our customers would see this mess if we published it!! Thank the Lord above they are seeing none of this right now.

We are only saved by the fact we are in project mode and none of this is out there under the eyes of our users.

We feel cheated.

The issues started when we were seeing wireframes of the online design and getting access to our supplier’s agency components library.

At pitch stage we saw pages and pages of static imagery and website case studies that all looked great to us. But we suspect the agency has lost a lot of design talent in the last year.

More than this though there is a blatant slapdash quality to what we see whether it is mock-ups, early prototypes, components returned to us after HOURS of detailed lines of feedback. It’s not even that it looks unfinished (which it does) – it has no through line! The agency’s design looks like a band of blindfolded strangers at a train station put the designs together at gunpoint.

We wish this was exaggeration. 

And we are exhausted with major issue reporting and escalations. Nothing we do makes any difference. The owners of the agency come to endless meetings with our Sponsor and promise radical improvement yet as soon as they helicopter out, we are left again with a design team that look out on their feet, thousand-yard stares on their faces.

We are exhausted and right now even though it would cost a lot of money to ship them out and go again, we are ready to stop this and move on.

Any help is really appreciated.

Fed up of Bog Standards

I am a PM from Buffalo NY. I work in a financial services company. We are 11 months into an ERP replacement project with Salesforce.

The initial stages were positive – working out that we needed to move off our current ERP, working out what we needed, selecting, and onboarding a Salesforce ISV who is very strong in the market.

Even the opening stages of an Agile development cycle were solid – good sprints, high delivery, the right set of people watching demos and running blocks of UAT.

Initially, I could see the problem mounting when we started to see a more-than-average amount of queries being raised in UAT. But mostly these weren’t bugs – we were sweeping through items we knew we needed on top of what was a comprehensive set of RfP requirements.

But cash flow is good, and the company made a commitment upfront to getting this right even if it meant more investment. Our team was all warned against a half-cooked solution on Go Live Day.

Sprints are now completed, and we are into testing End 2 End. In short, after a couple of heavy months, I packed up last Friday, sat at my home desk and stared out the window and thought:

“I think we screwed up testing.”

You see, what we saw nothing of in UAT was whole batches of bugs hidden by the fact we were not using our entire dataset to test. We had uploaded a good size dummy dataset, focussing on a high volume of dummy transactions records. We were most focussed on how fast the system was going to process what is for us millions of transactions per months.

What the entire team did not see, me especially, is that the day-to-day elements of the system that need to fit our data standards – pipeline, real-time calculation, and forecasting – are all failing as we put the system together with our real data.

And it will fail again and again because half of the things we need aren’t there yet.

We’ve had summit meetings and Salesforce have thrown heavyweight resources at the problem: adding new user stories, helping us work out our own network of business rules.

But we can’t see our way out right now. We’ve done weeks of testing that has no predictable end and now our team is causing errors and sharing feedback that is wrong or confused. It’s making the problem worse.

What do you do in a scenario like this when smart people who are available and do test just aren’t coming up with the answers?

We are now under major pressure from our Board – getting it right did also mean not wasting the company’s money forever. We need a way out fast, and I just can’t see what fixes this.

Buried beneath data in Buffalo

This is a funny one. I hope it does not feel too slight given some of the challenges projects encounter. I have been a PM for about five years and have a good roster of projects under my belt, both at my current firm, a Legal Services company, and in a previous role. 

With some modesty, I do not find technical or complex elements of projects that concerning, and I work well with stakeholders and my teams. I have a no-nonsense approach. 

This is where the problem may come in. I’m impatient. A lot of that personality quirk I can deal with, and I mask my frustration enough to stay sane and helpful in most project scenarios. 

I am approaching the end of my limited patience with two people on a current project though – one in my own team, and one who is the data lead of our technology supplier.

Nothing they say is ever in summary. Whether it is an email, a report or in discussion during stand ups or our regular data progress meetings, minutes then whole meetings drift by in one endless monologue. 

And with the data lead in question, I have higher expectations and even lower results. I get that the technicalities of data migration require terminology and technical description, but this is absurd. Even the most basic questions I ask – how long? What is the main issue? What is your proposed fix? – all turn into complicated, verbal assaults on the senses that are not stopped by my regular interruptions. 

In both cases, it is like the full narrative must be explained to me in all its glorious detail to avoid any risk I miss an ounce of detail or context in my descriptions to the project board or the team.

Read Also: Nice Group, Nothing Is Getting Done – Help

My team colleague is also starting to incur the wrath of the rest. Sometimes we are at the point of shutting this person down just so we can get onto other actions, and I don’t work like that. 

But I do need some tangible advice here. I have been having recent discussions about potential swap out of both people, to be honest, if only to avoid major communication and data risks. Is that unfair? 

That is the crux of the matter. I am at the point where I either try a set of things once more myself with the good members of the team helping, or I press on and slowly but surely neutralise the issue. 

I would really appreciate some guidance. 

Braindead through listening. 

Help! I am at absolute breaking point with my team. I am a Project Manager in a midsize publishing company in the UK. And, I have been running, or attempting to run, our core CRM Project for eleven months now. In brief, my team is a nightmare!

I say that. They are really nice people. Ok, I have some politics to deal with in the group but in general the problem is not that they do not get along, or indeed that they do not get along with me. It’s just that since the start of the project, I have been doing ALL OF THE WORK!

I can be quite hard on myself in general so straight off the bat I have recently been like “am I being too lenient? Am I being unclear about tasks I know I have delegated? Have I set all this up wrong in terms of what the group think the TEAM MEETING and its ACTIONS section is meant to cover.”

But in reality, I think I have set up a good project with all the right things in place – a Project Board, a Sponsor, the Team, RAID logs, plans, template etc and we have a good supplier. But they have only recently been onboarded and are already starting to spot the rot – items they have requested weeks ago remain In Progress on our action tracker.

Team Meetings

I have opened certain recent team meetings discussing whether we have an issue. It’s terrible – I get what I usually get which is a lot of good discussion and ideas even some of the re-commitment to stale actions, and even apologies with an awareness that a lot of the work falls at my feet. Yet, a day or two later, most have gone back to their BAU or to some of the easy parts of the project like preparing for our internal Town Halls, and I am left holding baby with a massive, growing To Do list.

I think I am at the point of an escalation to Project Board – my Sponsor is aware of the issue yet has taken somewhat of a tough approach to me, stating that the project will improve WHEN I win that battle and get them to be more proactive on my behalf.

But I need the strong-arm approach – I need my sponsor and the board to officially mark the lack of progress and do something real that turns this around for me.

I guess on top of this I don’t want to Tell Teacher. As I say they are good people and they do have day jobs, and I do not want the impression to be that our Board should shout at the team without understanding those nuances.

But yeah, right now, at the end of most LONG days, I want to give up (which would mean quitting the role not just the project) and yeah, I would like the Board to shout at them all and get them to actually do the work that gets us in a better state of progress.

Savi Help!

Exhausted in Publishing