Dear Savi,

Nothing will become of nothing

Got a problem that needs solving?

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

GetSavi response:

Dear There’s No IT in Team

Oh dear. You highlight a delicate topic here.

Inactivity in a Project Team is a real problem, especially when it is a single individual not pulling their weight.

As you have said, this causes conflict in teams and can lead to demotivation in good team players. It certainly does not make your life easier, needing to manage a high volume of incomplete actions.

The involvement of IT representatives in technology projects is critical. They know the current systems very well, they understand the surrounding ecosystem, and they know where the greatest risks lie in delivering a technical solution poorly.

In many projects where a new supplier is brought on board it can be hard for an internal Head of IT to feel like they retain ownership of ‘their’ systems from a technical perspective. Some IT departments have a lot to lose, once a new system is launched with a third party.

You may need to remind this person one-to-one of their value and of the stake in the future they will keep, even though some services will now be with a third party. This may help renew this person’s motivation and get them back to the action list with more vigour. If this fails, this is where you need to involve your Project Sponsor.

Remember, you are not this person’s boss and he is a senior person within the company. You can’t make him do anything, so there is nothing to feel bad about if you have tried the usual steps of reminding, cajoling, begging, and it has not worked.  Place this problem in the lap of your Project Sponsor. A simple, effective step may be to arrange a short meeting between the three of you to discuss the problem. This can be framed as you are both worried the IT person does not have the time to complete his project tasks, so you would like to work through some options, such as delegating some of his tasks to to others in his team. At the very least your Head of IT will be aware that other senior stakeholders are aware of the problem, so it is harder to just keep fobbing you off.

In truth I do not know the root cause of your IT representative’s current inertia. It may simply be down to a need to more fully manage their bad habits like a tendency to be distracted from actions.

We know this behaviour can lead to project delays and IT is vital to certain tasks in the lead-up to a go-live so you are right to be worried about it, and to look for a resolution.

A final note – tackling these kinds of problems should never become personal. Your Head of IT is a grown-up and knows you have a responsibility to your project.  And he will also know if you have taken all reasonable steps to resolve this with him one-to-one before escalating to your Project Sponsor.

Good luck with it!

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