Project Management Spider Senses

I’ve been a project manager long enough to have gotten to work on a troubled project or two. After a couple of decades of managing, you start to develop a sort of sixth sense about when a project is developing problems. This is true whether you are managing a project or are a resource on a project. Remember how when you learned to ride a bicycle, and you could feel those tiny vibrations in the handlebars just before it began to develop a “speed wobble,” which was usually followed by a trip to the ER? Ride a bike long enough, and you get to where you can detect those vibrations really early on. Work on a project long enough and you reach a point where you can feel it starting to wobble, often before there are any noticeable warning signs.

And when it comes to trouble, communication acts as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. It’s usually the first thing to go when the project is in distress. You see the PM start spending more and more time in his or her office or the conference room with the door closed. You’ll also see a couple of team members with knit brows perennially huddled in corners and whispering to each other. Status reports and meetings are often cryptic and brief.

Most of the projects I’ve seen (and I’ve seen quite a few) just won’t discuss their problems in the open. Instead, they retreat inward and try to fix them. All too often, managers won’t share any news internally or externally unless they have good news to share. If the news is not good, they simply say nothing and wait until they have something positive to report.

When things go wrong, retreat may not be your best option. Secrets generally don’t help projects. Communication has to flow freely and openly throughout the life cycle, in good times and in bad. Bad news simply doesn’t get better with age.

When Chuck Yeager famously broke through the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, the controls became mushy and unresponsive, but instead of retreating, Yeager did something amazing. He gave the flying “bullet with wings” even more throttle and powered through it until control was restored.

Oftentimes the only solution to trouble is to acknowledge it and to plow straight through it. What other early project warning signs have you observed?