A Project Manager You Can't Trust

Improving Technical Productivity

A Project Manager You Can't Trust

By Steve Wetterling

Who would want to work for, with, or anywhere near a Project Manager you can't trust? And how would you know he couldn't be trusted? What does he look like, this untrustworthy PM?

There's the PM who's more eager to please management than he is to listen to credible input and develop a realistic schedule that can be trusted. There's the PM who abandons responsibility for team performance ("They don't work for me, I'm just the PM!"), who can't be trusted to step into the murky territory of project quality. Then there's the PM who waters down bad news for fear of looking bad himself or of confrontation in general, whose team doesn't trust him to surface hard truths.

A "trustworthy" PM is capable, believable, dependable, ethical and honest. With a trustworthy Project Manager, team members feel respected and safe. If people trust the PM, he can be effective even when things go wrong. Trust takes time to build and not much time to lose.

Quick Tip: The Candid Meeting

When a project has a number of things going on like performance issues, political problems, misunderstandings, or tug of war between the vendor and the design team, how can you get those issues out into the open? Invite your stakeholder to a bi-weekly "candid" meeting.

Candid Meeting Rule #1: It's a one-on-one meeting. Rule #2: Just say it. The PM says whatever is happening, openly and directly. (This isn't a time to be politically correct, it's a time to be expedient.) Rule #3: No notes of the meeting--and "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."

The goal is to connect the stakeholder quickly to the project's issues and to get answers to questions like: Given this hard truth, what should we do? What can you, Project Stakeholder, do to help the project move forward?

Bi-weekly, just the PM and the key stakeholder. For the most politically complex projects, this really works.

Engineering Projects --

There's Nothing Like 'Em

We know. You've got tasks on a project to complete, and your work is critical if the next release is ever going to get done. Meanwhile, you keep getting called back to fix problems with the last release and, oh by the way, the vendor you've been working with to design the integration between his product and yours has delivered something that doesn't work.

Whether you're the PM or someone working with the PM, the challenge to figure things out, get them done, and beat the competition to market--well, it's pretty much endless, right?

We can help. Our experienced project managers and technical communication experts know just what you're dealing with.

Give us a call. Sign up for a class. Shoot us an email. How can we help you?

Sincerely,

Gary C. Hinkle

President and CEO

Auxilium, Inc.

503-293-3557