Just when is a good time to sound the alarm?

One question I get asked often is when is the best time to notify your project sponsor or executive that there is trouble on your project? While I believe there are several versions of an answer that can be crafted for this question, I would like to give you my general overview on the topic.

In our training and coaching we teach there are 5 stages or status that a project can be experiencing at any given time. Healthy, Challenged, Struggling, Troubled, and Critical.

During our healthy times, all is well and no action is generally required. However projects often move to a challenged stage. At this point a project manager needs to look “into themselves” and realize the skills, training, and experiences they have and look for resolution to the challenge. If the project progresses into a struggling stage, a project manager needs to start to look beyond themselves and potentially start conversations and seek advice from their peer group, network, and other associates we all tend to have as advisors. In a struggling stage the project sponsor and executive should be made aware of the struggle as they may have advice, guidance and council that could prove useful. Most often, I have found that during a struggling state the sponsor or executives are still kept in the dark, especially as the project moves into a troubled state. During the troubled stage of a project, all sponsors and executives need to be clearly communicated with on the state of the project and outside help may be required to turn this project back towards a healthy status. If left unchecked, the project slides into a critical stage where outright failure may be pending. Once a project slides from troubled into critical, our window of opportunity to recover this project starts to close drastically.

All too often the project sponsors and executives find out about the true status of a troubled project as it slips from the troubled stage to the critical stage in my example.

We teach project managers and teams the fine balance between unnecessary alerts of problems and the proactive alerting when help is required. There are plenty of human dynamics at play when it comes to declaring problems and admitting trouble and we guide PMs and the teams through new ways of looking at this issues.

I always remind my audiences that as PMs you may be suppressing some of the actual status to your sponsor – but know that your team members may be doing the exact same thing to you. Work the problems together as a team, and if you need help – give us a call.

Have a great weekend everyone!

“B”