We’ve All Been There

Whether you’re a new project manager or seasoned management professional, it’s a safe bet
you’ve encountered one, and likely many, projects that have failed. Anyone who spends time at
the office water-cooler can likely attest to this. Trading these “war stories” has almost become
an unofficial hallmark of seasoned project managers. Here, it’s important that we define failure.
Certainly, failure often means not delivering on the project objectives. However, by taking a
closer look at the impact of failing circumstances in the project environment we can arrive at a
helpful call to action for all project managers.

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Redefining Failure

In my experience, the above definition of failure can, and should, be expanded to include the
negative impact of a troubling project environment in pursuit of project objectives. In other
words, at what cost was success achieved or strived for? If a year-long project barely meets
the most basic objectives, but internal relationships were ruined, communication barriers arose
where they did not exist, and key resources left, was the project a success? If team members
sacrificed personal time, fought with coworkers, or became jaded with their careers, will the
ultimate impact of the project on the company still be a success? Did the
project experience help promote future projects, or will team members carry over their
resentment to future work? Projects, by definition, are temporary endeavors (Project
Management Institute, 2008, p. 5). Thus, viewing the experience of being on a project as part
of the project’s success is an approach that is necessitated by the organizational and societal
requirements of what a project is.

Revisiting Success

Understanding the implications of this expanded definition of failure also sets the course
toward effective project management. Knowing that many projects fail, all project managers
need to expect, and prepare for, the challenge of managing tasks and resources in stressful
and potentially disruptive project environments. The ”war stories” mentioned earlier often
contain high-level themes such as bickering among team members (or between teams),
strained client-contractor relationships, and high levels of stress. The specific impacts may
include troubling outcomes such as loud yelling, proverbial backstabbing, fired employees, and
even contract disputes.

Given the weight and scope of this issue, it is important to note that no project manager is
superman or superwoman. Most of today’s projects are too complex and wide ranging for any
one individual, no matter how much authority or experience they may have with the project, to
ensure success on his or her own. All project managers must rely on others: their project team,
contractors, the client, vendors, and stakeholders to perform their tasks. Thus, one of the most
important roles for today’s project manager is to lead by example and demonstrate nuanced
leadership when facedwith these challenging environments in a way that positively impacts
everyone involved.

The following ten insights provide specific examples of how a project manager can
demonstrate the leadership required by projects with a tough environment.

1. When Others Try to Sink the Ship, Raise the Water Level.
When tensions rise and project outcomes become questionable, team members may have
worries over compensation, performance reviews, and even job security. In my experience,
and as Emerson warns, these failing conditions can lead to questionable behavior (Emerson,
1904). Specific examples may include team members withholding negative performance
updates for fear of repercussions, being quick to pass blame and to take credit, or cutting
corners to achieve results. In other words, an “every person for themselves” environment can
and often does take over. These actions all directly reduce the project’s chances of success,
and the savvy project manager must not be a part of it. When others squabble it is the project
manager’s responsibility to maintain respect and high emotional intelligence at all times. Don’t
chastise the communication of poor results; use the information to achieve improvements.
When others begin to blame, state you’re not interested in the cause, rather the solution. If
deliverables are of low quality, don’t embarrass the owner, but communicate the need to get it
right in a professional manner. By constantly creating a team environment and focusing on the
goals of the project, the project manager will be a beacon to others. Team members will greatly
value the direction and support, as if being given an umbrella in a storm.

2. Show Strength, Not Stress.

Raising the water level is by no means easy. Tempers flare, sleep may be hard to come by,
and there can be important goals at stake. By exhibiting strength not stress, the project
manager will create an environment for the solution, not provide another indicator that the path
is difficult. When dealing with difficult individuals, arguments, and unexpected setbacks at the
wrong time, project managers must not show stress. Rather, they should communicate the
importance of staying focused, applying documented processes, and maintaining perspective.
Specific examples include never losing your temper or making overly concerned statements
such as ”here we go again,” or “this is too much,” or “I can’t believe we’re still behind.” Even
unintentional actions such as loud sighs, extensive forehead rubbing, and a general rushed
and chaotic demeanor will reinforce the concern within other team members. And if the team
sees one of their leaders exhibiting stress, the undeniable reaction will be that their stress will
increase. Thus, project managers need to show strength through a focused demeanor,
purposeful actions, and reassuring but honest statements that promote progress.

3. Miss the Bus.

One of the most frequent war stories I hear from project managers and team members on
troubled projects is: “was thrown under the bus!” Examples include being put on the spot in the
big meeting at the last minute, being associated with failures that are outside your control, or
being blamed for decisions that were not your own. Thus, all project managers must
understand the intricacies of the interactions and meetings they participate in and be prepared
to be put on the spot unexpectedly or challenged directly. Use empathy to understand the
dynamic project managers need to have detailed, applicable responses to maintain the
confidence of their team and stakeholders. Look deeper than the obvious conflicts inherent in
the power structure and the vendor-client relationship, and understand the dynamics of the
team and the customized stressors between key players. Understanding precisely what is
driving, and more specifically, stressing, teams and team members is the project manager’s
road map to anticipating conflict and being prepared with comprises and solutions. Before each
meeting, review the risks at hand and practice your answers. Here it is important to
communicate with your team and ask what they are seeing on a daily basis. Have there been
recent arguments? Are they aware of risks that exist but haven’t been formally discussed yet?
What areas on the schedule are slipping the most? Have they seen angry e-mail exchanges?
Through this preparation you can prevent appearing defensive and unprepared and help keep
your emotions at bay in the heat of the moment.
4. See the Forest…AND the Trees.

The forest idiom is widely used in management to emphasize the relationship between seeing
the big picture versus the details. However, this is a false dichotomy and in challenging project
environments it is critical for project managers to be keenly aware of both the details driving the
specific risks and their impact on the overall big picture. A failure to understand the specifics of
either, and the relationship between the two, is a warning to stakeholders and the team that the
project manager may be overwhelmed. In many instances, the intricate details of a risk or
problem, the ”trees,” can be aggregated and assessed to provide newand useful information on
the overall project objectives. However, it is equally as important to understand the “forest,” or
the high-level environmental and organizational factors that permeate the project at all times,
which can just as easily influence individual risks. Importantly, this is not a linear relationship,
but rather a cyclical, integrated relationship where the details and the big picture variables will
be continuously impacting each other. This dynamic requires project managers to be vigilant in
their awareness of the project environment and to constantly reassess the changes it
undergoes and their resulting assumptions. Conducting weekly project environment analyses
with your team can keep these important considerations on everyone’s radar.

5. Don’t Look Back, Look Two Steps Ahead.

Almost all challenging projects share one major foundational risk–-a slipping schedule. When
tasks and deliverables are late, the near-automatic result is an overall reduction in the quality
of the deliverable and concurrency amongst tasks that were meant to be consecutive. In other
words, finishing the product or service begins to take priority over process and planning.
Statements I’ve heard that signal a slipping schedule include “We need to get this done ASAP,”
“The boss asked for it yesterday,” and “We can’t afford to lose any more ground.” Many project
managers are tempted to respond by adding resources, doing more, and doing it faster.

But this approach can create additional risks. Therefore, it is important for project managers to
conduct more planning when the schedule is slipping, not less. When deliverables are coming
fast, the project manager needs to plan for the expected outcomes of reduced quality, such as
rework, and the impact on the next deliverable and the next after that. When resources are re-
assigned to the late deliverables to catch up, where did they come from and what is the impact
to their originally assigned work? Making resource and scheduling decisions by looking two
steps ahead will help prevent further schedule risk, and communicating your analysis upward
serves to mitigate the stress caused by unexpected slippage.

6. Beat the Blame Game.

As we’ve seen, troubled projects can lead to late deliverables, late nights, and lost tempers.
The tendency to blame others when faced with negative feedback is a defensive reaction from
both new and experienced team members. Every project manager should refrain from
succumbing to this temptation and should not reinforce this behavior when it comes from
others. A key project stakeholder likely won’t be interested in which developer was sick for two
days, resulting in a late deliverable, but rather about what the impact is, and most importantly,
the solution. Blame is by definition a retroactive behavior, and when the schedule is behind
there is little time for anything except value-added actions. Further, by assigning blame in a
direct or derogatory manner, team members may “go underground” and stop raising risks, or
even worse, cover them up. This effect will be amplified if blame is assigned in a public forum
such as a large meeting. No one wants to add stress to the project or be the cause of more
delays. Instead, focus on specific actions the owner can do to help secure a resolution. This
will help ensure team members buy into the focus on the overall objectives. Lastly, a
documented review process should be in place for all team members that provides an
opportunity to discuss mistakes and improvement points in the proper perspective and away
from the heat of the moment.

7. Own Your Mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes, and this is especially true for team members working on a
challenging project. Mistakes can range from insignificant to serious, but they are all the same
in that they are inevitable. Accepting this will put project managers in the right mind set to
respond appropriately. First, admit your mistakes at the appropriate time when they are
relevant to your audience or the work at hand. This will begin to ensure trust between you and
your team and the stakeholders. It is one of the most important signs of integrity and ethical
behavior. Further, experienced leaders, such as executive stakeholders, are skilled at
assessing performance based on how individuals respond to their mistakes. Be honest, and
come prepared with a solution, or at a minimum an assessment of the impact. This will further
demonstrate foresight and your focus on the goals at hand. One example of useful mistake
acknowledgment is:

“Today we identified a new risk. The eight hours of coding completed by our team
yesterday will need to be redone due to the fact that it was completed using incomplete
scenarios. We were able to uncover this mistake swiftly due to our internal control
procedures. We’re already working on the resolution, and the attached proposed project
plan updates show we are projecting to be back on track by the end of the day.”

By accepting ownership of the mistake, a project manager will be a model to team members in
how to deal with difficult situations and encourage others to escalate their mistakes without fear
of the reaction.

8. Reach Across the Aisle.

Lack of communication among the key teams and groups is a prevalent aspect of troubled
projects. These may be organizational in nature, such as the inherent divide between a client
and the project management contractor, or more subtle and due to situational factors such as
the stress, blame, and strained relationships discussed above. Successful project managers
know that without open communication the chances of a turnaround are severely hampered.

Identify the group, or individual, you are communicating with the least, or least successfully,
and jumpstart the relationship. Find out what may be causing the breakdown and take action.
Is the resource very quiet by nature or new to the role? Are they not aware of the scope of
information being sought? Are they the appropriate resource to be providing the information
sought? Often- times there is a logical and solvable explanation for communication
breakdowns. For example, on a year-long project there was a resource that was consistently a
few hours late when submitting updates that needed to be submitted to leadership. After two
months of poor communication, management finally reached out to the individual about the
delay. Turns out he had had a recurring meeting with the most senior project stakeholder the
entire morning of the reporting day! The simple solution was that he was allowed to submit his
updates the day before the deadline. Although the solution won’t always be this clear cut, it
shows the value of building bridges where they did not exist.

9. Don’t be a Dead Fish.

It’s been said that only a dead fish goes with the flow. In other words, it can be much easier for
a project manager to say “yes” to stakeholders than “yes, that’s a good idea, but we need to
keep in mind these three serious potential ramifications,” and so forth. Project managers must
rely on their judgment to do what, in their analysis, is best to achieve the objectives the team
has been tasked with achieving. This is far easier said than done, especially on troubled
projects that are scrambling to recoup lost time.

However, here it is the project manager’s responsibility to ensure management doesn’t make
matters worse by the decisions implemented. This requires the strength to speak up and
disagree, even with senior individuals. Failure to act can be just as hazardous to the project’s
progress as specific actions, such as implementing a bad decision or blaming others. Project
managers should always be aware of the unintended consequences of decisions and their
impact on other areas of the project that may not appear obvious. When the time comes to
disagree, the project manager should have an analysis, reasoned argument, or documentation
available to support his or her view. This will lead to a value-added discussion about other
alternatives that may work better given the circumstances and may even inspire other new
ideas from the team.

10. Learn from Your Lessons.

All good project managers know that when a project is done, lessons that were learned on the
project need to be documented and discussed for future reference for the organization and the
team (Project Management Institute, 2008, p. 102). But how many project managers
document their lessons? How did you get out of that tough spot with the argumentative team
member? What reporting tools did you use to highlight slipping progress in a way that hadn’t
been done before? What communication techniques worked well in the challenging daily
meeting?

Track what you’ve learned from both the situational and personal interactions
that challenged you and start keeping your own list similar to the one above. Update it after
each project and continue to hone your leadership skills. You may be surprised not just by how
much you’ve learned and experienced, but by how helpful it is to keep these important
experiences in mind when facing your next tough project.

Redefining Success

With these ten insights in mind, we can revisit our original quotation and customize it to the
project management field:

In failing circumstances, project managers must be relied on for their integrity and
leadership to provide project teams the best chance to succeed.

No project manager can achieve success on his or her own. But what he or she must do is
promote that success to the best of his or her ability through maintaining effective leadership
and emotional intelligence, especially when facing challenging environments. Thus, we can
conclude that a successful project manager is one who creates a project environment that
is the most conducive to collectively achieving the project objectives.

Focusing on this redefined success reveals that a project itself may fail, even though the
project manager succeeded. And this is true. By maintaining an effective leadership style, even
when times are tough, the project manager will succeed in raising the risks early for
appropriate assessment, limiting losses, and securing as much value as possible. The project
manager will also succeed in winning the respect and appreciation of stakeholders and team
members for effectively leading the effort even if specific results were not obtained. This may
lead to increased opportunities for future value-added projects and possibly even a revisit of
the components that originally failed. Projects come to an end, but the organizations,
processes, and deliverables they support often do not. A successful project manager is one
who recognizes this and leaves a positive impact not only on the results at hand but on the
environment and individuals therein that will exist even after the project ends.

References

1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1904). The Conduct of Life (vol 6, p 91). New York:
Houghton Mifflin Co.
2. Project Management Institute. (2008). A Guide to the Project Management Body of
Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) (4thed.). Newtown Square, PA: Project Management
Institute.

About the Author

David Ciriello is a Project Management Professional (PMP®) and Project Management

Institute Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP®) credential holder with six years of project
management and project management office experience. Mr. Ciriello has supported or led
many IT and business initiatives for executive leadership in the areas of strategic planning, risk
management, governance, process improvement and status reporting.

He is a graduate of Oxford University and is based in New York City where he focuses on the
public sector. He is an active community volunteer and currently serves on the Board of
Directors for a New York based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Mr. Ciriello is a member of
the PMI New York City Chapter and can be reached at david.ciriello@alumni-oxford.com.