ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. Every two weeks we get together to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager. We cover what it takes to get certified, what it takes to do the job of project management.

I’m your host, Nick Walker. And beside me are our in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. They are project managers for project managers. They instruct other project managers and those working to become one. So, guys, last time we talked about projects that are in trouble. And we want to catch the trouble before they go up in flames. We talked about a lot of ways to do that. So let’s recap just a little bit and then go forward and talk about how we get to the end and really make this project a success.

ANDY CROWE: You know what, Nick, this is something we need to be talking about in the project management community. So the approach that most companies take is they say, well, we’re going to look at ways to never get in this situation. But the truth is over two thirds of projects come in over time and over budget, and they don’t meet the critical success factors. They don’t hit that target, that elusive butterfly of success. They never capture it in their net. And so what do you do if you’re in that situation? And to be honest, I’ve taught and mentored PMs before who live in that situation, so it’s not an unusual thing. It’s just difficult to talk about.

NICK WALKER: Two thirds of projects. That’s an amazing statistic.

ANDY CROWE: Yeah, the actual numbers are worse than that. But we’re going to be happy and say two thirds.

BILL YATES: And it’s a reality. So why not get tooled up in learning how to do this part of my job as a project manager? And we, you know, the first session we talked about the first step is identifying that, identifying when I’m in a project that is in serious trouble, so how to detect it. We talked about smelling the smoke and looking at the canary.

ANDY CROWE: Yeah, Bill liked the more intuitive approach, and I advocated for the data-driven approach. But those two meet, absolutely. Those two intersect.

BILL YATES: Absolutely.

NICK WALKER: And then we have to come up with just the correct approach. And there are a couple of different ways to go there, too.

BILL YATES: Yeah. Some companies, they go with the tiger team, the parachute in the expert that’s me to come fix everything. And then what we really focused on more was the do-it-yourself, the you are leading a project. You’ve determined that it is in serious trouble. So what are you going to do about it?

NICK WALKER: And I loved how you emphasized so much the need to try to keep calm because intuitively this is the time that you’re going to be the least calm, perhaps.

BILL YATES: Yeah. You’ve gone to that “in case of emergency” box. You’ve busted it open, and you’re trying to calm yourself down so that you can actually lead the team with competency and professionalism.

ANDY CROWE: Right. We talked about last time nobody’s at their best leading out of fear.

NICK WALKER: And then there was that aha moment for me where we talked about trying to move forward, but in order to do that you’ve got to move backward before you do.

BILL YATES: Right. Yeah, you have to do root cause analysis. You have to fully understand what is the problem. Maybe, to Andy’s point before, we’ve got some reports that have shown some troubling trends. We have the data in front of us. Now we’ve got to roll our sleeves up, get into it, and figure out what is causing us to miss our milestones. Why are our budgets suddenly blowing up? Why are all the errors and defects suddenly cropping up where they weren’t before?

ANDY CROWE: So Bill, let me ask you a question in starting us off in the next step here. You’re dealing with a lot of different dynamics. Some of those may, we talked about the last time, when those relate to scope and how to simplify and refocus on critical success factors.

BILL YATES: Right.

ANDY CROWE: What happens when all of that’s okay, and the real problem is in the team? What do you do?

BILL YATES: Yeah. Now, if you identify the problem as being related to team members, what do you do with that? That’s tricky. That’s tricky.

ANDY CROWE: It can be tricky. I think the first thing you’ve got to do is, again, even some root cause analysis there. But I’m going to confess something here at the risk of smearing my reputation myself a little bit. I have – I used to be on a tiger team that was sent in to troubled projects for customers. I worked with a consulting company. And we went around, and when a project was in trouble, we came in and tried to help right that project.

One of the first things that I think you need to do a lot of times is get rid of the bad actors on the team. I think you need to let people go, if you remotely have that authority or influence in order to do so. So I’m a big fan of that. I feel like – I think, ultimately, every failure is a leadership failure at some level. And so a lot of times what would happen is they would have let the project manager go, and they brought in our team to kind of help figure out what was going on.

So that had already been taken care of. The PM had already been let go. Sometimes it hadn’t. Sometimes it was a technical lead. Sometimes it was a business analyst. Sometimes it was a programmer, et cetera. And I’m a believer that, you know what, be decisive. Take decisive resource action.

BILL YATES: It’s tough. For a leader to lead, you’ve got to have followers. And those followers, they’re looking very closely at the leader and how does she respond in a situation? How does he lead in a situation? It’s one thing when you’re partying, having fun because you’re hitting the milestones, the customer’s happy, the budget’s – you’re finding more money. You know, we want more scope. We want more of everything.

ANDY CROWE: Everybody should have one project like that in their life. I have. I’ve had one.

BILL YATES: But for the rest of us, the reality is, so we’re dealing with this troubled project. People are looking to see how the leader is leading. And in many cases that is the project manager. Is that person decisive? Are they able to, again, completely get their hands around that root cause, that trouble? And if that is an individual, if I look in my hands, and I’ve got a person in my hands, then what am I going to do about it?

ANDY CROWE: Well, I can answer that. So you act decisively.

BILL YATES: Yup.

ANDY CROWE: You let the person go on the project. You move them on to someplace they can be more successful. So there’s some of that is for the sake of the project in general, sort of at a high-level holistic sense. But there’s science behind this. So Virginia Satir came up years ago with something called Family Systems Theory. And it really translates beyond the family. Family Systems Theory says that you may not be able by yourself to change the whole dynamic. You may not be responsible for the whole dynamic. But you can change the way you’re behaving in a system, and that will change the whole system.

Letting somebody go who’s perhaps not performing at peak performance, who hasn’t been doing what they’ve been doing, just changing that one ingredient will change the whole thing. And think about it this way, too. Think about it in the sense of ingredients. You’ve probably cooked before. I love to cook. And when you do, sometimes you can no longer taste the individual ingredients. But it’s the way they’re combining. It’s the chemistry and the interaction of those ingredients that’s actually producing something that sort of transcends the individual pieces.

BILL YATES: Right.

ANDY CROWE: That’s what happens with teams. Teams – and it can happen in a good way. And we’ve all seen that. And it can happen in a very toxic bad way. And so sometimes, even if it’s not the person’s individual fault, moving them off the project will change the whole chemistry, the whole interaction, and the whole dynamic. And it sends a good message.

NICK WALKER: So it’s not always the project manager that needs to leave.

ANDY CROWE: Right, correct. Now, that’s our tribe. So we’re kind of dealing with our own dirty laundry here. But, no, it oftentimes is not. But if the PM has any authority to reshape the team, just rebooting the team and refactoring it can oftentimes be a good thing.

BILL YATES: And I want to go back to that notion that the team’s watching. I’ll confess, the older I get, the more I’m convinced that a strong leader assesses the team and determines, is there a weaker person on this team, or people on the team that need to be let go? Because those top performers, let’s say – let’s just use a rating. We’ll say I have eights, nines, and tens on my team. If there’s a six on the team, or a five on the team, the eights and nines and tens are watching me as the leader to see do I put up with that, do I tolerate it.

ANDY CROWE: Correct.

BILL YATES: What do I do with that individual? Do I try to train them? Do I try to improve their performance? At what point do I make the decision I need to move them off the team? Because the eights, nines, and tens are saying, I want to be on the best team, and I want the strong leader who will make my team stronger.

NICK WALKER: And you know, Andy, something you said just really underlines something that was in a conversation I was having just yesterday with a friend of mine. We were talking about a team that I’m on. And he says there are three C’s with teamwork. One is competence, character, and the third one is chemistry. And it seems to me that chemistry is so incredibly vital and maybe even the hardest one to achieve.

ANDY CROWE: It is the hardest one because you can’t always anticipate how different team personalities,