Hello fellow project specialists, team leads and project managers! How is it going? It is hump day…mid week. Hope your week is treating you well and hope your projects are running smoothly.
So lets straight dive into today’s content…Today’s post is focused on addressing issues during a project transition. This is a critical article when you are taking over a project and/or taking on your first project. Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in comments section below!
As a project manager, you may have been brought into a project while it is in the middle of a specific phase. This period of taking over a project can be stressful, especially when you only have a limited amount of time to get up to speed on the project while also trying to make sure that it can stay on track. This article is not intended to cover how to do a project transition, but more about understanding project issues that are on-going and how to best understand/resolve them.
Everyone has various ways of how to address issues/concerns when taking over a project. Whenever I take over a PM role within a project and I am trying to understand the issues within the project, I usually take the following approach:
- Understand the problem. Why is there an issue in the project in the first place? How did this issue occur and what caused it? When taking over a project, it may be hard to get answers to some of these questions up front. However, as you begin to interact with the project stakeholders, it is good to ask these types of questions to the stakeholders to get their perspective.
- Piece it together. After speaking to a few stakeholders on the team about the specific issue, it is important to take a step back and analyze how they reacted, what each of them said and what their perspective on this particular issue is. From there, take the approach to see how all of this comes together in the grand scheme of the project.
- Develop options for resolution. Notice how I did not say only a ‘single’ option. A project manager is responsible for developing options to resolving project related issues and must be able to take a step forward that can bring an issue to resolution and eventual closure. Run through the options in your mind (or on the board) and see how things would evolve based on implementing a resolution option.
- Get a perspective. Besides going over it yourself, you will also need to get perspectives from the other team members to make sure that their respective workstreams are not significantly impacted by a resolution option. This means speaking to the functional team, technical team, change management team, etc to understand how this will potentially impact them. If there is an impact, determine the severity of the impact. Depending on how severe the impact is, as a project manager, you may need to adjust your resolution option and tailor it to limit the impact the specified groups. In this step, it is also important to speak to the client with whom you are working with to make sure that they are also bought into the potential resolution steps and will provide support to implement it (if the resolution works out).
- Implement the resolution option. This step involves deploying the resolution option for the major project issue across the team and explaining how this will solve the project related issue. It will be important to monitor how the resolution will impact users over the coming days and/or weeks and then making necessary adjustments to keep the project on track.
Taking this type of proactive approach to resolving a major project issue when taking over a project is necessary in order to become a strong project manager. By being proactive, developing options, adapting to the team’s concerns/impacts, and checking on the progress of the issue resolution are all strong skills that a project manager should have in his/her tool set.
Hope you found this article helpful. What steps or actions have you taken when taking over a project? Please provide your feedback in the comments below! We would love to hear from you!
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