Happy Friday fellow PMs!! Hope you all are doing well and staying safe.
As a first time project manager, you may experience some level of stress when discussing an issue that you learned about for the first time. This is perfectly normal to feel some level of stress the first few times around! I am here to explain an approach that has worked well for me, and can be utilized across any type of project that you are working on.
Understand the issue at its core.
As a project manager, it is very important to understand the issue that the project is facing. This includes the details of the issue, the type of issue being faced, how it happened/came up, what areas does this issue impact in terms of tasks, timeline, budget and resources.
Have a clear strategy/set of approaches to resolve the issue.
Once the issue has been fully analyzed and understood, it is important to come up with a strategy and approach that can be executed to solve for the issue. As a project manager, you should be able to come up with two to four different solutions to the issue and align with the one that makes the most feasible sense, is cost effective and keeps projects disruptions at the minimum.
Be able to explain the issue to someone with no background in technology.
The project leadership team that you may be reporting to may not have strong/significant experience within IT or the area that you may leading the project for. So, when preparing for the meeting with the project leadership team, your approach in bringing up the issue, explaining the details behind it and the resolution plan should be easy for them to understand. At the same time, it should be presented in an executive manner, which means that it should be concise, to the point, and clear.
Be ready to be questioned on why and how this happened.
If an issue is significant enough, then there is definitely a high probability that the project leadership team will ask how and why did this issue happen. Now, the way you approach this is up to you but it’s best to use facts and reasoning here. Even though your role is project manager, which is essentially managing the project, you can not stay on top of every single task and micromanage your team. Here, the approach should be to lay out the situation as it happened (of course in a concise/summarized fashion), and then explain what you did to stay on top of the potential risk that became an issue, and what you are doing now to “limit the bleeding”. Here, its important to provide the appropriate messaging so that the project leadership understands the situation.
Be open to feedback from project leadership.
The project leadership team will give their own perspective of the issue that you will bring up to them. Here, its very important to actively listen to what each of them are saying. Some of the points that will be brought up will definitely be actionable, while other points brought up may just be another way of expressing the issue/approach with a different type of lens. At this point, it is important to use your judgement to decide which type of advice that you should take and apply vs. nice to listen to. Here, its important to acknowledge everyone’s feedback and not take anything personal. At the end of the day, they are not there to attack your method of work, but rather provide advice and guidance to make sure the project can stay on track and be delivered successfully.
No one wants to face issues at work and we all want to be on top of the work that we own. However, as project managers, there are sometimes situations that can come up, which can impact the project overall, whether it’s a minimum level of impact or a high level of impact. As project managers, we should be ready to come up with a plan of action to resolve the issue and be ready to explain it to the project leadership. Granted, project leadership may directly blame the project manager for this happening. However, if you have taken some of my feedback from the other articles, you will have a clear understanding of where the project stands at any given point in time, assuming that you have been regularly meeting with the team on progress.
Hope you found this post helpful! What approach do you take to bring up and address issues with stakeholders? Let us know in the comments below! If you are interested in a specific topic, please let us know.