As you can imagine, most projects in this world are accompanied by a significant amount of stress, worries and tension. While in tension, people often redirect their stress and seek someone to represent the root cause of their problems. And in those situations, project managers are amongst the most vulnerable team members. Indeed, it is the project manager who provides the client with certain expectations, even if they have to mitigate multiple risks in order to meet those expectations. It is the project manager who implies deadlines and conveys client demands (in this article, I am not talking about agile environments where the team manages itself). And it is the project manager who is expected to resolve all the impediments and to mitigate the risks.
As a result, many project managers become “paranoid” over time. The whole idea of risk management is to constantly visualize all possible and impossible bad scenarios and their impacts, to assign them levels of probability, and to do everything possible to prevent them from happening.
Statistically, most project issues cause delays (i.e., impact project schedule), and it is not a surprise that many inexperienced traditional project managers are concerned about the schedule rather than the cost or the quality/scope of what they deliver. The trigger behind that prioritization is the “not to fail” mindset. If the project is behind, typically the stakeholders notice it way before they test the product or inquire about the remaining budget.
Like any other professional, project managers learn from experience. If they could prevent project delays by completing certain tasks ahead of time, this seems like a pretty painless, proactive action. But in order to speed up the work, you must convince others why it is important. In many cases, team members work on multiple activities, and they would rather defer tasks that are less urgent.
Imagine you go above and beyond to deliver a low priority task as soon as possible. As a result, you achieve a milestone, but then you wait days or weeks for the next activity or phase to begin, and you find out that there was no need to rush. In the meantime, someone else’s project experiences delays because their key resource was busy rushing your activity to completion.
So once again, this is about your emotional intelligence, analytical skills and communication. Before you approach someone and ask them to facilitate, escalate or accelerate a certain task, do your own “math”:
1) Is this task really urgent? Is it on your critical path? What happens if it gets delayed? What are the risks associated with completing is later?
2) If the task is really a priority, do some more “math” and consider what happens if you rush it. What negative impacts could this potentially cause (either on your product or service quality, your stakeholder relationship, your budget, your team spirit, etc.). Think of the mitigation strategies for those impacts.
3) Once ready, relay the processed information to your team - first and foremost to your SMEs, who can add to your considerations.
After doing this “math”, your guidance will be more valuable and reliable. Your team will be more likely to support you if they understand the logic behind your actions and contribute to the decision making.