You know the feeling when life is flying by you and you’re not aware of where things stand? Maybe you are so busy that you aren’t budgeting your money well. Or you have so many clients or potential clients that you’re missing scheduled calls or needing to postpone meetings at the last minute. My freshman year in college I don’t think I dated anyone. Sophomore year in college was a different story…many dates and several different girlfriends all stuffed into the first two months of the new school year. Thankfully, three months in I meant the love of my life – my future and current wife – and my life, and my grades, stabilized. But for those first two months it was chaos and I honestly didn’t even have my class schedule memorized – though yes, I was going to class…I think.


This can be so true of our projects, too, when we get overloaded. It can be our project workload – maybe multiple projects took off at high speed all at once. Or maybe something came up in our personal lives – good or bad - that is occupying our train of thought. Whatever the cause or the problem, it can wreak havoc on one or more of our projects. If you’re in this situation, you may not be aware of it. But I’m going to give you five signs (and I’m sure there are many more) that you may be losing control of one or more of your projects due to distraction, work overload, or maybe you’re just in over your head technically speaking or can’t handle your team chemistry. Whatever the issue, look for these signs and then wake up and take some corrective action before you find yourself out of a project or out of a job.


You keep canceling or postponing client meetings


It’s never good to cancel or postpone your client meetings. I don’t care how busy you are or how slow the project is. Even if you just have a five-minute phone call to say, “Nothing has changed,” you still need to hold them. If you find that you’re often canceling meetings with your client then you need to re-assess what’s important. Your customer won’t stand for that lack of contact long before they start to become dissatisfied and lose confidence in your ability to deliver in your PM role. And you will likely find out that they’ve lost that confidence from someone higher than you in the organization – see one of my next points.


You’re not meeting with your team on a weekly basis


I moved from the Midwest to Las Vegas to be the corporate application development manager for the second largest casino/gaming organization in the world. I was in a new environment, in a considerably different position – going from strictly project management and consulting to managing a group of developers in an industry that I had never worked in before – and I was also busy looking for a house for my family 1500 miles from where we previously lived. To say life was chaotic would be an understatement. If found it easier to cancel my development team meetings than to conduct them if I was busy or if nothing major was happening. But that was wrong…I was new to my team and they were new to me and they needed guidance…they needed a manager after all the changes they had recently been through. I woke up, forced myself to stay on track, hold those meetings no matter what, and it wasn’t long before I had a much more confident and cohesive team. The same is true on our projects. Conduct those weekly meetings no matter what. Maybe there won’t be anything new to cover. But it still builds cohesion among your team members and being a consistent leader is half the battle of getting your team to follow you and respect you.


Your CEO gets a call from the client about the project


In a larger organization this could be anyone in your senior management, and in smaller organizations, this very well could be your CEO. Whoever it is, if they’re above you and your client is calling them with concern and you didn’t expect it, then you don’t have a firm grip on your project and something needs to change. You must be on top of issues or your customer will sense that you aren’t and will quickly lose confidence. If this goes on for too long, these calls will happen.


You don’t have the major tasks in the project committed to memory


Like my example above of not knowing my class schedule that first month of the school year, if you don’t wake up in the middle of the night able to recite the key milestones in your project schedule, then there is something wrong. If you don’t have most of the schedule – especially what’s currently going on and what’s coming up – committed to memory, then you need to take a step back and re-assess what’s going on and what you need to do right now to get a firm grip on what you’re managing.


You have no idea where the project budget stands


If you aren’t managing and forecasting the budget weekly, then you’re not doing enough. And if you completely lack the awareness of where your project budget stands, then you’re really heading for disaster. You’ll likely wake up to find yourself way over budget with no ability to take enough corrective action to save the project. Just like you really can’t go a month without balancing your checkbook, you can’t do that on your project either. If you do, then you’ll probably find your project financially spiraling out of control.

Project managers see their value on the project. The team does. Senior leadership usually does as well. The customer sponsor? Yes, usually. But there time and those certain customers, team members and other stakeholders who are so focused on the project budget and trying to manage everything from their side that they may not really see the value of the delivery project manager. It's a costly position to the project and it's usually an oversight role – not hands-on technical doing the daily configuration and design work on the end solution.


What do you do about these types of customers? As the PM, how do you show your value or do your best to keep the customer satisfied throughout the project engagement? From my experience with these types of customers and stakeholders, there are five key ways that the project manager can show definite value to the project for the project team, the project customer/sponsor, and executive management.


Stay out of the way. This one is fairly straightforward. By stay out of the way, I mean just that…only do what you have to do to keep the project moving forward productively. This should not be common practice. However, there are those customers out there – and I’ve encountered a few of them – who do not see much value in a high-priced project manager running the engagement. When you have one of these types of customers, you must do your best to show value while at the same time do your best to cost the project as little as possible. Don’t travel when you can just send one developer on site. Watch the amount of hours you charge to the project every week. Steer clear of excessive meetings. Keep costs down…period.


Add technical oversight and effort where needed. If you’re the project manager and you bring some technical skills to the table, use those when possible to fill in gaps. I was onsite with my team at one major airline customer for a software install and I found myself doing data loads between meetings because our team was small and our time was short. It helped and we were able to meet our deadline for deployment.


Gain visibility for the project. Act as the ambassador for your project. Want to make the customer feels more important? Lobby your project to senior management and get them involved. A visit by the CEO or some other high ranking individual in your organization at a future project status meeting will let the customer know the project is important to your company and that they are an important customer who is being taken seriously. If you have recently experienced any issues that have resulted in some customer frustration, this can go along way in mending the situation.


Provide detailed budget management. Close budget management should seem like a no-brainer, but so many project managers do this poorly. It’s your client’s money and if you make it a priority to closely track it and reforecast it and report on it continually throughout the project you’ll be ensuring that your project never gets far off track financially without it being known to everyone. Your customer will see the value in that oversight and feel much more comfortable with the project and how their money is being spent on project resources if they are included in that reporting process.


Track risks carefully. This is another area that seems logical, but is often overlooked. Some risks are usually identified upfront and then set aside as if the process is over. Instead of going that dangerous route, include a section in the weekly project status report for risk management. If risks are constantly in front of the team and the customer and even better – actually assigned to team members to keep track of – then the likelihood of something unexpected bringing the project to a halt is greatly decreased.


Summary / call for input


The bottom line is this...we must continually show value throughout the project relationship with these individuals so as to maintain the highest level of customer confidence and satisfaction. Readers – have you ever been in this situation? What did you do and how do you agree with this list?

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