Thought Piece

Take the example of a weekly project reporting cycle. The idea is that the Project Manager for each piece of work should sit down each week with their whole team and the project plan, and ask questions. "What have we done?" "What is there to do?" "What are our problems?" "Is anything stopping us?" The point of this process is that it will confirm where the team are on track and it will discover things to do that nobody knew about. It will expose gaps, issues, and things not considered that need to be known. The team gets to look at the map together, and make sure that everyone is in the right place, travelling at the planned pace and going in the right direction.

This is valuable within the team, and in principle the project manager should want to do it even if they have no programme director to report to and no weekly report. A process of weekly reporting gives some guidance, structure and discipline.

Weekly reports can be used to communicate new discoveries to a programme director (if you have one), who has a view across all the projects and the opportunity to reassess decisions and say "that doesn't sound like a good idea, I want you to do this instead". Or they might say "we need more people in the room to solve this problem; let's get together and solve it". Finally, they can broadcast updates and overviews to senior stakeholders and back to the teams.
Now suppose the project managers ignore the plan and use their weekly meetings to focus on the issues of the moment. The problem with this is that over time, they don't make sure that anything else is happening at all. Then all of a sudden, the plan is out of date everywhere, and it takes tremendous effort to get back on track.
Using the plan properly would have prevented that. As soon as you start on a project of any size or complexity, you cannot afford to just do whatever makes the most noise and hope that what needs to be done is in there somewhere. Having the knowledge and thought process of true project management is different from just being great at getting stuff done. Appointing someone talented and energetic who lacks those crucial skills can be an expensive, traumatic mistake.

Culture and real news

There are different, valid ways of being a project manager, but no matter whether your primary focus is on keeping track, or on getting out there and in everyone's face, you should be asking constantly "what is stopping you?" The same is true for the programme director.

But there's another side; the teams have to be telling the truth. That means there has to be an atmosphere in which everyone can say "this is stopping us, and we need your help to resolve it". And that means they must respect and trust the person they are talking to, so that person has to both deserve that trust and be willing to speak up and ask the dumb question. The environment has to be such that people can say what they need to say, and not be tempted to cover problems with either silence or noise. This can be hard to achieve, especially if the organisation doesn't normally work that way, but it's necessary for success. As Peter says, in a project that has been going wrong, bad news is good news.

Fun with alarm bells

Part of that culture is treating red as your friend. In common project management software like Microsoft Project, you set task dependencies, how long each takes, and constraints like go-live dates. The critical path is calculated automatically, and you get a warning if any change results in being late. This is a good thing, because you want to know that now, not later. The earlier you know it, the more chances you have to change something else and resolve the problem.
In the risks and issues log, you use a scoring system to alert you that a problem needs to be solved, and you commonly set it up so that something turns red when a high score occurs. Red says "let's get together as a team and work out what to do". The earlier you hear this, the more effective your problem solving will be. There will be problems that can't be solved within the team that has the problem, and the project manager for that team might be tempted to hide them, but the goal should be to find and share them as early as possible.

So as a project manager, is your job to prevent problems, to solve problems, or to share problems? It's all three.
Once the question "what is stopping you?" has been asked and answered, the problem solving can start, which, for many people, is the fun part.

Banks are not charities. But they do calculate the lifetime value of the customer and they understand the reputational risk to themselves of the slash and burn exercises they are sometimes accused of.

That brings us to the role of the banks, so often the largest creditor and certainly the one with the most intimate knowledge of how a company is faring. We all love a stereotype and the heartless, faceless bank pulling the plug on sound businesses over a minor blip sits deep in the business consciousness. But not all banks fit this caricature. "We want to work with management of a business facing difficulties to help identify the issues and provide solutions to get them back on track," says a senior manager with a leading retail bank. "We can make the most impact when the problems are identified early. We are keen for management to be open with us."

Banks are not charities. But they do calculate the lifetime value of the customer and they understand the reputational risk to themselves of the slash and burn exercises they are sometimes accused of. Most solutions to business difficulties involve access to more funds and/or different products (hedging, leasing, factoring) and that all adds up to continued and profitable involvement for the bank.

A Repositioning Turnaround may mean divestment of a troublesome subsidiary. It may mean embarking on (yet another) cost-cutting exercise, including turning away revenue opportunities if they are not of a sufficiently high margin. It most certainly involves a first step of getting an impartial and pragmatic overview of what the problem actually is, from Turnaround Professionals who also know the kind of language with which to talk to banks. The moment you take this kind of decisive action, you're likely to discover that there's no crisis, no drama, only urgent action that must start now.

Peter Charles 2010