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