Codeword is a medium-size firm that designs and manufactures electronic

systems for the mass transit industry. It competes with other firms to win
contracts to provide such systems. When Codeword receives a contract, it
creates a project to complete the work. Most projects range from $10 million to
$50 million in cost and from one to three years in duration. Codeword can
have 6 to 12 projects going on at any one time, in various stages of
completion—some just starting and others finishing.
Codeword has a handful of project managers who report to the general manager; other people
report to their functional manager. For example, the electronics engineers all report to the
manager of electrical engineering, who reports to
the general manager. The functional manager assigns particular individuals to
work on various projects. Some people work full time on a project, whereas
others split their time among two or three projects. Although individuals are
assigned to work for a project manager on a specific project, administratively
they still report to their functional manager.
Jack Kowalski has been with the company for about 12 years, since graduating
from college with a BS in electronic engineering. He has worked his way up to
senior electronics engineer and reports to the manager of electrical engineering.
He has worked on many projects and is well respected within the company. Jack
has been asking for an opportunity to be a project manager. When Codeword is
awarded a $15 million contract to design and manufacture an advanced electronics system for a
new aircraft, the general manager promotes Jack to project manager and asks him to run this
project.
Jack works with the functional managers to get the best people available
assigned to the project. Most of the people are buddies who have worked with
Jack on previous projects. However, with Jack’s position as senior electronics
engineer vacant, the manager of electrical engineering has no one with the
appropriate level of expertise to assign to Jack’s project. So the manager hires a
new person, Alfreda Bryson. Lured away from a competitor, Alfreda has a Ph.D.
in electronic engineering and eight years’experience. She was able to command a
high salary—more than Jack is making. She is assigned to Jack’s project full time
as the senior electronics engineer.
Jack takes a special interest in Alfreda’s work and asks to meet with her to
discuss her design approaches. Most of these meetings turn into monologues,
with Jack suggesting how Alfreda should do the design and paying little attention
to what she says.
Finally, Alfreda asks Jack why he is spending so much more time reviewing
her work than that of the other engineers on the project. He responds,“I don’t
have to check theirs. I know how they work. I’ve worked with them on other
projects. You’re the new kid on the block, and I want to be sure you understand
the way we do things here, which may be different than at your previous
employer.”
On another occasion, Alfreda shows Jack what she thinks is a creative design
approach that will result in a lower-cost system. Jack tells her,“I don’t even have
a Ph.D. and I can see that that won’t work. Don’t be so esoteric; just stick to
basic sound engineering.”
During a business trip with Dennis Freeman, another engineer assigned to the
project who has known Jack for six years, Alfreda says that she is frustrated with
the way Jack treats her.“Jack is acting more like the electronics engineer for the
project than the project manager,”she tells Dennis.“Besides, I have forgotten
more about designing electronics than Jack ever knew! He really isn’t up to
date on electronic design methodologies.”She also tells Dennis that she’s
planning to discuss the matter with the manager of electrical engineering and
that she would never have taken the job with Codeword if she had known it
was going to be like this.

Gido, Jack; Clements, James P. (2014-02-05). Successful Project Management (Page 349).
Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

Siri Maley
Chapter 10: Case Study 1. Questions 1-4.
1. Do you think Jack is ready to serve as a project manager? Why or why not? How could Jack
have prepared for his new role?
No. We see this a lot with subject matter experts transitioning into cross-disciplinary work.
The good ones know how to manage people (SME groups), but haven’t learned—at work, at
least—how to manage project teams. Honestly, Jack doesn’t seem like a good one. No only
isn’t he aware on a foundation level that he has changed jobs (which I’ve learned requires
 more self-awareness than I’d thought), he appears to be fundamentally bad at developing
people. In fact, he’s not just bad at developing and counseling people, he’s bad at reading
them. Alfreda says that he’s acting more like the senior EE than the PM, but he sounds like a
pretty bad senior EE if that involves delivering monologues to subordinates and ignoring
their input. And beyond being a poor ‘senior EE’, he also doesn’t have the cross-disciplinary
skills—or apparently interest—to organize and control a project.
Jack should have prepared to project manage before he asked for the job by getting to know
and learn from others who have made the transition. He should also talk to those who’ve
come from different backgrounds, and find at least one to be a more permanent mentor. He
should have taken this class and others, because then he could’ve read this case study and
known better. Self-evaluate! He’s terrible at this and appears to have essentially on self-
awareness. He could’ve shadowed a PM, either at work (they could have a program for this)
or in another organization.

2. What is the major problem with the way Jack interacts with Alfreda?
He’s a condescending jerk. He doesn’t listen to what she has to say (which by the way, is the
very reason they paid all that money to get a PhD with 8 years’ experience). He denigrates
her ideas without offering any evidence, much less substantive design advice. (e.g. We’ve
tried someone like this on X, maybe you could look through those documents and see if there
are lessons to learn there.) He’s not really delegating to her, at least not at the level of
responsibility and latitude she’s capable of handling. He doesn’t care to know her at all, and
he’s targeting her deliberately. It has crossed my mind that he may be misogynistic, but I
think ‘buddies’ is used as gender-neutral here so that’s not an assumption I’d jump to at this
point. He can’t or won’t read her, and appears to think that none of his attitude will in any
way negatively affect her. (Even if he’s completely correct about all of this, as a manager this
should really be his primary concern.)

3. Why do you think Alfreda has not had an open discussion with Jack about the way he is
treating her? If Alfreda approaches Jack directly, how do you think he will respond?
Presumably it’s because he’s acting like a condescending jerk. She has not trust or respect for
him, which he hasn’t earned and she apparently hasn’t offered. (After all, she is insulting him
behind his back.)
I try to be optimistic about how people will respond to being openly and assertively (not
aggressively) engaged on an issue. Other the other hand, Jack’s gotten a long way in this
organization with this attitude, so I can’t blame Alfreda for her apparent disillusionment. I
think that she could present her abilities in such a way as to help him wake up, but it would
be hard and likely take longer than with outside intervention. Plus, he can lash out when
confronted, as with the ‘I don’t even had a PhD’ line. I suspect a generic open discussion
would not be very productive just one-on-one, but people can surprise you.

4. How do you think the manager of electrical engineering will respond to this situation? What
should the manager do?
I think they’ll be absolutely pissed at Jack. They and the rest of the management team went
through a lot of trouble to pull Alfreda away from the competition, and they’re paying her a
lot. That’s even separate from the concern’s they’d have about corporate culture (and
potentially discrimination, but I’ll leave that alone).
If I were the FM, I’d contact Jack’s boss, who is presumably a current or previous PM and
explain the situation. They’ve probably seen it before and have learned how to handle the
discussion with Jack. On the other hand, they also provide zero training and apparently very
limited oversight, so there’s that. If they needed it, I’d take part in the discussion of what, as
an FM, I’d appreciate having new PMs learn in training. I’d at least make sure that this
conversation happened. (It should be a broader discussion; a company policy would be
good.)
Beyond that, my responsibility is to Alfreda, who appears to need to be talked down from
jumping ship. I’d explain that this [Jack’s] sort of behavior is not in the best interests of the
company and is addressed immediately. I’d also go to Jack, who I presumably know quite
well, and vouch for Alfreda’s credentials. I might even vouch for the merits of her specific
suggestion, though without actually pushing for its use. (There are still plenty of trade-offs
that I don’t know about, I’m just telling him that functionally it’s a clever design because X.)