All posts by : Savi

I am contacting you with great urgency as my project is in big trouble.

I am project managing a large system implementation in the automotive industry. We have reached the end of the first phase, which is ‘‘discovery’’ with our supplier, and are already in arrears on our project budget!

Worse still, we have just been examining the predicted costs with our supplier for the full project, and we are going to go approximately 150% over budget if we press ahead and deliver what we scoped out in the Business Case.

There are many reasons for this massive change.

The person who was PM before me bid for the least amount of money to be approved at in the Business Case as there were arguments about the timeframe and benefit for such a project. Therefore, a lean budget for the initial phases got approved to get the project started with a promise of further investment that has yet not materialised

I took over at the beginning of the introduction of the new supplier and immediately flagged this risk, yet it got put off several times by my Sponsor and the Senior Management Team. Now, everyone is acting surprised that this risk is red hot on the register, and we are in a panic to negotiate on costs.

Secondary to this problem. We spent a lot of money early in the project on data preparation. This is a good thing to have done as our data is now in great quality to be migrated. Yet, we enlisted the support of a “Rolls Royce” data specialist company rather than sharing the effort between a company and our in-house data teams. This cost a lot of money.

Finally, ‘‘discovery’’ has taken far too long and invoicing has been 150% higher than what we budgeted for at the beginning. Again, I have constantly raised concerns about the budget.

Now the full extent of the overspend is known and everyone is looking for someone to blame. That seems to be me.

The last Board was very unpleasant and there seems to be a consensus that I should have prevented this – despite my reporting and risk alerts in recent months.

I know my Sponsor has faith in me and no one is angling for a new PM at his point given the last person basically left before being fired.

But it does not seem fair to me to bear the brunt of all the blame and besides, I just want to get the project back on track.

I am really worried because the original Finance Lead is now on long term sick leave and the new person in charge of the project budget is contemplating a stop to the project for the entire initiative to be re-evaluated.

This would set us back months and would cause a huge issue with our contracted supplier.

Savi, please help.

Up Budget Creek without a Paddle

I have read a lot of the posts on here about internal problems, which are really useful. I wanted to get in contact as I have a major concern about our supplier.

I am Project Manager for two interlinked projects for the same company (an online betting start-up) with the same supplier covering both a website build and the back-end database development.

I’ve been a Project Manager for ten years in areas like gaming and immersive events management. I advertised and was successful in winning this two-year contract from a job site.

I like the internal team – although they do not have a lot of Project Management experience which I will come to in a moment. As you may expect, online gambling must comply strictly with a whole host of regulations and is a numbers game, so the internal team, some of whom are on my project, are very smart but very introverted and theory based.

This has not caused an issue in direct collaboration – we get work done and they let me lead on any comms, engagement, planning and delivery challenges. All my problems began when we onboarded our supplier – a very well-known smaller agency in the gaming and online gamification space.

I will be as fair as I can be and say they share a lot of the same traits and experience as the internal team, which is partly why they got the job, and why they are a genuine good, long-term fit.

Yet I am good at identifying bad behaviour and, since joining, their Project Lead and Technical Lead have both done everything in their power to undermine my position and minimise my influence over project events.

I have not been invited to meetings only to then discover them midway through a very important planning session. They often railroad both our mini Senior Management Team meetings and our Show-and-Tells of the emerging software. They openly, inaccurately stated I had very minimal data migration skills when some of my finest credentials have been in managing complex data projects.

I have done all the standard proactive things to address the problem. I spoke with these two people head-on, only to be met with blank faces like I was blowing things out of all proportion. I escalated this to my Sponsor, simply to mark that there was some untrustworthy behaviour observed. He was polite but seemed to write it off as natural in this work environment.

I even confided in a Project Team member who was very compassionate in private yet openly stated she did not want to tackle the issue, or get involved – it had to be dealt with by me and the company’s leadership.

I need this job and I am damned if I am going to back down, but I need a way to get back onside very quickly now as I do feel the project getting away from me.

I would really welcome your advice on what to do next.

Undermined PM

I want to start with an apology if what follows sounds like a character assassination. It isn’t.

Unfortunately, I am contacting you with a very specific problem about a single person. A problem that has been going on for months now and it has gotten to the point where I am struggling to speak with this person outside of the boundaries of the Project Team meetings.

I am a PM in the middle of a very tricky project to introduce a Student Management System at a UK university. We are about 12 months into an 18-month project, so testing is intensifying, and we are slowly but surely starting to think about the go-live plan.

My problem is this. Since the end of supplier selection, my Head of IT has taken a full vacation from doing any work on the project. The guy does nothing!

He is obviously an important stakeholder as he and his team understand the infrastructure of the university, its network and security, and to be fair, has a lot of experience in legacy databases and system support. He was very vocal when we chose the supplier. Since then, he has gone on vacation as far as this project is concerned.

It is so demoralising. As I am sure you know, when a senior stakeholder has no interest in the project, it creates an atmosphere around the project and sets a poor example to others. Some members of the project team have recently become lax in their own actions, albeit to a much smaller degree. One or two are vocal in their frustration, but at me, not at him!

He wields a certain amount of power with the university’s Chief Information Officer and consequently I think a lot of the team are afraid to speak up. They all have day jobs and parts of the current infrastructure they still need favours on if something goes wrong, or they need help with short term project resource in other areas.

The worst thing is – he is a nice guy! Every time I approach him on the issue, he nods his head acknowledging he must get better at action completion and every time thereafter, nothing changes.

I think it is because he has a fairly busy roster of work in general and also, he does tend to tinker away at projects. I have often seen him distracted on our project because he has jumped in to look at something in another project. But even then, I don’t think the work gets done elsewhere either!

I am a big believer in “no one gets left behind” and even if I did want to remove him from the project, I think that would be politically different given his connections, and of course I still need his input.

What do I do?

There’s No IT in Team

I am a Project Communications Lead for a regional logistics company. I have responsibility for our wider internal comms remit, but our company runs many projects and I have been given a broader role in this past year. Our SMT and Project Managers are very positive about the need for regular, effective comms about change.

This is ironic as in my twenty years in communications I do not think I have ever encountered a more passive and unresponsive staff body.

I know this is common with internal comms in general. We have very poor open rates on our rolling internal newsletter. We have the least-attended All-Staff briefings. I even have to plant questions into sessions where our MD speaks to staff at the beginning of each quarter to avoid a deathly silence.

I am trying to be creative. At the start of the year, we asked for volunteers for an internal change champions’ network to help discuss and engage with the annual change plan. I got four volunteers out of a staff body of 400. Four!

I have lost count of the number of internal suggestion boxes and project inboxes for feedback that I set up that have sat empty or with pitifully few staff queries shared.

And yet somehow projects happen and go live. People come to training, process what they need to know and use any system we deliver.

But I write this with a particular concern. We have a learning platform to deliver next year, and I am at the point where I want to say to our leadership team that they should abandon it as a project. I have very little evidence that staff will buy into the project or offer us genuine feedback on something that must be delivered well active participation from staff, if it is going to deliver on its supposed benefits.

We’ve bought training solutions before with very poor uptake, which then turn onto a waste of money.

Have you got any magic ideas about how you an awaken and engage staff when it really does seem they have no or little care about what goes on beyond their day jobs?

Deafened by the Sound of Silence

Greetings from Australia! I’m writing to get your advice on an odd issue with my project and specifically my Project Sponsor.

I work in the projects team for a group of insurance companies, and I’ve been tasked with standardising all of our different accounting systems and processes to enable easy management and reporting across the group. The companies in the group have been acquired from standalone businesses and of course everything about their ways of accounting and their systems can be wildly different, just like everything else.

I was assigned this project by the Group Finance Director (GFD), who is my Sponsor on the project.  On the face of it, this would be ideal. The GFD has seniority over the stakeholders in the various finance teams and has a vested interest in streamlining finance management across the group. I would have the GFD’s authority to get cooperation from people around the group.

This last point is important as it is an open secret that ‘streamlining financial operations’ is a polite way of saying ‘cutting down duplicated staff functions’. Some of the people I need help from are likely to lose their jobs as part of the project. This is tough for them, but it is an inevitable part of merging the same functions when companies are bought.

Onto my big problem. After about a month on the project my Project Sponsor stopped responding to me. At first, it was long gaps between email responses or voicemails responses, then it was only a minority of emails getting a response, and now it has been literally three weeks without a word, despite numerous attempts to get in touch. We work in different States so it is not as if I can just hang around the coffee machine until he goes past.

I am pushing project tasks along as best I can, by arranging meetings with the various company finance teams but there are a number of critical decisions that I cannot make alone, plus I have some companies that are only minimally cooperating. This is of course where I need my Project Sponsor to beat them up a bit!

I am very worried that the project will go off the rails and I will get blamed. At the same time, I don’t want to go running around the organisation blaming the GFD, who is one of the most senior people in the whole group.

Help me, Savi, I’m really stuck.

My Project Sponsor Is Ignoring Me

I am writing to you as a PM involved in my first major implementation. I have done lots of projects before but mainly these have been policy-based or have involved much shorter timeframes.

The project I am now running is a 6-month HR implementation, providing a system which will ultimately cover our team’s processes from recruitment to performance management.

We’re in the first phase of the project, and I am going into the delivery stage with our technology supplier.

I have undertaken lots of research including taking the GetSavi course on Managing technology change projects, which I found incredibly useful.

I’m writing to you about a problem with my Project Sponsor. She is incredibly talented as our HR and People Director. Unfortunately, this role makes her extremely busy.

At first in the project, it was not an issue. I could see her time was short, yet she structured this with me and we got off to a good start with successful Business Case approval and her oversight of my management of requirements and selection.

During selection things began to fray. She is a very good delegator, but I felt nervous as she was starting to delegate both project tasks and key decision making.

For instance, she offered a view on the selection of the supplier yet left me to a final decision-making meeting. I had to point out that the final recommendation needed her fully-informed approval as well – Project Management best practice.

Now in delivery she is quite invisible. I have had several one-to-one Sponsor catch ups cancelled by her PA. She is apologetic but she did confirm that she has a strategic exercise she needs to run with the CEO which is higher priority, and has asked for any requests to come via email until she has more face time.

Some of this approach presents no issue. It is only when I really need the support, guidance, and advice from her that I find I am at a loss, as are my team.

We had a contract issue last month and with the exception of a conversation with our CFO about the final agreement we made with the supplier, I had to run the entire coordination process which left me behind on other tasks like running the project!

My question about all this is quite simple: should I be discussing our project swapping to a new Sponsor given she is so busy?

If I raised it this way with her, she may say yes, but I do wonder if it is my place to say this and what her reaction may be?

I would welcome your advice on this, especially if you have an alternative for me in solving this problem without raising the issue of a replacement. She is very good, and we do get on well it is just that the project is suffering right now without its Sponsor.

Wearing Too Many Hats

I’ve moved from managing relatively small projects with lots of supervision, to managing an enormous project by myself, and now I am out of my depth and struggling.

I confess there was a little bit of hubris on my part when I asked my manager for more challenging projects and more responsibility.

Well, be careful what you wish for. My manager gave me a project that was already struggling before the then-Project Manager went off on long-term sick leave. I was dropped-in about three months ago and I have been playing catch-up ever since.  My wish for autonomy has turned into isolation, and I feel like I am the Lone Ranger, responsible for the most difficult project I’ve ever worked on.

The project includes three suppliers, which means three sets of requirements, three sets of specifications and integrations, three sets of endless queries, disputes and supplier meetings. The printed documents would cover a large table in piles 20cm deep. And all of that is before I get to the huge number of internal stakeholders and their queries. I spend so long trying to keep on top of the volume of communications and changes that I have no time to plan forward on the project, except in the most simplistic way.

Reading my own words, I can tell this is heading for a crash. I am going to miss something important, some enormous surprise cost or delay will result, and it will all be blamed on me.

Savi, what do I do to avoid a disaster, especially one I asked to be assigned to?

The Lone Ranger on my project

I really appreciate the recent posts about tackling problems with Project Sponsorship and the wider management team. Your responses have been really helpful, as I am having a very similar problem right now.

I don’t want to make this an SMT-bashing affair, yet I do have some pretty enraging issues with my leadership team.

We are a luxury homeware product company. We have needed a new CRM system for many years as the current one is useless for our marketing and production teams’ needs.

We are getting left behind in every area of business right now by new alternatives, and understandably, our leadership team has some risk aversion around capital investment in projects.

But the CRM project I managed to get green-lit as a PM last year is running into major deep water simply because I cannot get a single decision out of the SMT. Not even one!

I think things were ok when we were at the requirements gathering and Request-for-Proposals stage with suppliers. The Business Case that had already been signed off had very stringent terms regarding quarterly budget reviews and approved spending, but I thought everyone was behind the real need to change and to introduce a CRM that really could revolutionise our sales and marketing strategies.

And I’m not even going to tell you about the five-month process to get our vendor approved and through our super-painful contracting process.

But ever since our vendor was selected and shared their plan for the project, everything has ground to a halt.

I have had to write papers with options about how workshops will be managed that remain unreviewed by the management team – and apparently this prevents us running workshops. The workshops would have been completed by now if they had been given a go-ahead by our Sponsor.

In reaction to the impasse, our vendor stated they could lengthen the project timeline and focus on another client this quarter, yet they would need a minor retainer and re-commitment to the new plan. Another paper written and sent up without any response.

For three consecutive reports, on the advice of my vendor and internal team, I have sent RED status reports up stating that we run the risk of losing our vendor altogether and having to pause or rerun procurement. Again, no response except a holding line that the reports had been reviewed and seen as priority for a response.

I even staged a meeting with my Sponsor and the Head of Marketing who is facing some eye watering problems with our marketing lists using the current CRM. Yet I was looked upon like I was The Girl that Cried Wolf. My Sponsor simply did not see the urgency. “We have been managing this issue, and projects take time. I do not see the risk here and cannot magically accelerate our project to completion next month.” What he said, quote unquote.

I desperately need some help as I really see the failure of the project nearby, and I don’t want to drop forever what should be seen as an answer to our problems.

Help me Savi!

Desperately seeking decisions