Project Manager Decisiveness

Scenarios

Scenario 1. Your organization has an important project that has high visibility with senior management but, even so, it somehow hasn’t been going at all well. It’s plagued with performance problems and is way behind schedule. Oh, and they’re pretty sure that it’s at least 17% or so above budget. A couple of the project’s key staff members approach you about maybe getting transferred to your program and let you know that the project team's morale is sinking fast on the project. Given all this, you can scarcely contain your joy when your supervisor informs you that, effective immediately, you are the project’s new manager. She directs you to have a get-well plan on her desk in a week.

As you take over the project, which do you think is more important?

1. Quickly setting a new direction for the project
2. Avoiding your predecessor’s mistakes by learning all you can about the project and what’s happened on it.
   
   

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Scenario 2. You get a call from your project’s sponsor. Because an onrushing comet is due to wipe out all human life in three weeks, he wants your project’s final deliverable in two weeks rather than the four weeks you currently have left on the project. He feels that abrupt change is essential to allow a week for the product’s final review and revision. You know that meeting this new deadline will be particularly challenging due to the sudden up-tick in your staff’s church attendance.

You respond:

1. That’s a challenge, but we’ll get it done
2. Let me get with my staff to develop some alternatives and get back to you.
   
   

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Scenario 3. One of your task managers enters your office in an agitated state and insists that one of the project’s senior technical people is creating a very bad chemistry on the task team and must be taken off his task immediately. He knows his stuff and his products are very good. However, the way he delivers frequent unsolicited technical input and feedback to others is creating friction on the team and distracting them from what they have to do. “He’s gotta go”, the task manager insists, “like yesterday.” As you listen, it occurs to you that you have absolutely no other place on the project to assign this individual whose products have been highly praised by the project’s sponsor.

You respond with:

1. Either something like “OK, he’s gone” or “Sorry, I hear what you’re saying but we can’t just drop him. You’re a manager, so manage.”
2. Something like “Let me talk to him and find out why he thinks he’s supposed to give everyone his input.”
   
   

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It’s pretty clear that the “1” alternative for each these three scenarios represents on-the-spot decision making while “2” involves deferring a decision to get more information.

What if your responses were different across the three scenarios? Here your thought process behind your responses reveal more than your responses themselves. What circumstances (besides the second scenario’s immanent and universal destruction that made another promotion unlikely no matter what) were you considering in deciding to go one way in a scenario and another way in the other ones?

• Maybe with the first scenario, you thought that the poor staff morale and senior management’s still-itchy trigger finger made the calming influence of quick and certain redirection more important than the risk of redirecting to the wrong direction. Or maybe you wanted to first find out what’s really been going wrong before you went dancing in the project’s minefield, even at the risk of prolonging the project’s dire situation.
• Maybe in the second scenario you thought that when a sponsor tells you they absolutely need something done, for whatever reason, it’s your job as a PM to make it happen without hesitation. Or maybe you thought that you would owe it to your sponsor to identify and alert them to the inevitable trade-offs involved in such abrupt redirection.
• Maybe in the third scenario you thought that the fact that the task manager was in such an agitated state suggested that a cooler head should look into what was going on and why. Or maybe you thought that it’s important to communicate through quick action that the team’s well being and the project’s success trumps any personal agenda.

Whatever the differences might be, what do they suggest about which factors drive your decision making and how you tailor your decision making to different kinds of situations? 

So what if you consistently chose the same alternative across the three scenarios? While this is not a rigorously validated test, picking the same response for all three scenarios suggests a preference for a particular decision-making style. Do you agree with the conclusion that you have a clear decision making preference? If not, what other situation or decision type would have led you to choose a different type of decision making? Why?

Take a few moments to think about your anwers to these questions and then jot down some notes on them. Those notes will be useful in comparing your scenario responses to those you give to  the questions on the decision-making exercise we'll turn to next.