Roles and Responsibilities of the PSO with Respect to Distressed Projects

Every project in the project portfolio should have several milestone events at which a project review takes place. The reviews can be powerful tools for early detection and corrective actions. First of all, the Project Support Office (PSO) needs to take project reviews very seriously. The project review may be the first opportunity to spot signs of a project potentially becoming distressed and to take corrective steps. For the astute project manager, this should not be a surprise. He or she would already be aware of the potential distressed condition and have taken the appropriate steps. At this early stage, ask the project manager to discover why the condition exists and put preventive measures in place to prevent a recurrence. The senior project managers on the project review panel will be able to offer a number of possible corrective measures. At the next project review, focus on the effectiveness of the steps taken by the project manager. Has the early warning sign been neutralized? If not, step up the intensity of the corrective measures.

The worst thing would be to do nothing and hope the situation will self-correct. It won't, so why take the risk? This reminds me of team members who practice hope creep. I talked about that in Chapter 1. Recall that hope creep is the situation where a team member falls behind schedule but doesn't report it. Their hope is that they will get caught up by the next status report date. That might happen, but it is not too likely. If you suspect that this might be going on under the table, check it out. You want your team members to be open and honest. Hiding problems is not good behavior for any of your team members or for you. That behavior lets the whole team and your client down. Rely on the project review panel. They should be committed to using their own experiences and problem-solving skills to help you succeed.

When the project has reached a distressed state, project reviews take on a heightened sense of importance and action. Recall that the project review is chaired by the PSO Director and attended by a review panel whose members are other senior-level project managers. Depending on the nature of the distressed condition, the membership of the review panel may be changed to include expertise focused on the problem situation. The distressed project review is not just a formality. It begins with the intervention process previously depicted in Figure 16-6, with the added involvement of the PSO through the review panel. I want to take a closer look at what that involvement might include.

The reports that track early warning signs would have alerted the PSO Director to a pending problem and the potential distressed situation, indicating that some preemptive action is called for. So even before the project becomes distressed, a special session of the project review team might have been called. The focus of that review is prevention, and the project manager would be expected to present the get-well plan to restore the project. The project review team might offer revisions or alternatives. The next session of the project review would be scheduled, and the status of the project would again be placed under close scrutiny. The focus is still on prevention.

Despite all of that attention and support, the project may still fall into a distressed condition. The project review panel now becomes fully engaged in the intervention process for that project. It is critically important that that review panel intervention does not add time to the intervention process. Their support must be facilitative, not punitive.

Time is not on your side. The project may be on hold pending an approved plan to move forward, so the review panel should not add to the time needed to complete the intervention process. Instead, the panel should work collaboratively with the project team. For example, adding status reports would not be a good idea. That adds report preparation time and report presentation time. A better approach would include a level of involvement where the status is known just by the nature of the review panel's involvement. For example, one of the review panel members could be assigned to the project team for the duration of the intervention process. This panel member would be responsible for reporting project performance and status back to the entire review panel until there has been some disposition of the project.

In addition to the project review role, the PSO should be constantly aware of project performance — not through progress reports, but by walking around and observing. There is no substitute for stopping in on a project manager or team meeting and just observing what is taking place. These informal visits can help build a relationship with the project manager and the team, and can be a good source of information that won't show up on any progress reports or during a project review.

Analyzing the Current Situation

The added value of the review panel is that they provide an objective viewpoint of monitoring the analysis activities. Because the review panel members are outsiders, they may look at the Root Cause Analysis a bit differently and spot something that the project team would have otherwise overlooked. Also, the review panel may observe something that triggers a thought of a past experience they had and a suggestion for what they did that might help this project. Several ideas should be forthcoming from the review panel members.

Revising the Desired Goal

All of the workshop planning and facilitating can be done by a representative from the review panel. Presumably, he or she would have previous experience with these types of workshops and can relieve the project manager to focus on the problem at hand.

The revised goal might be reduced in scope for this version, with a second version fulfilling the remaining requirements of the original goal. Reducing scope will reduce the risk of failure of a project that has gone distressed once and is a likely candidate for going into a distressed state again.

Evaluating the Options

The project manager should seek the advice of the PSO in the evaluation of the options. An outsider without preconceived ideas about what should be done will be the best critic. If the PSO concurs with the evaluation and the resulting prioritization of alternatives, a project plan can be built.

Generating the Revised Plan

The review panel can appoint one of their members or someone else who has experience facilitating project planning sessions. This will relieve the project manager of that responsibility so that he or she can focus on the project itself. To the extent possible, do not put an aggressive plan together. That is only asking for a repeat of the distressed condition. The team will already feel the pressure from the earlier problem. Don't plant the seeds of another problem.