While a project manager is frequently called upon for their planning ability, the real skill we want from project managers is their ability to communicate. The job of a project manager is to align the team doing the work, with the organization goals driving the work, with the management and leadership teams trying to understand the work, while juggling all the constraints like budgets, timelines, and the endlessly changing expectations for the project. A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. A bad one will cost their weight in gold.
Mark was hired on as a contractor, reporting to Tegan. Tegan was fresh out of business school, complete with an MBA and a variety of project-management training certifications. Unfortunately for Mark and the rest of the team, and especially unfortunately for Tegan, she had absolutely no real world experience. To make matters worse, this wasn't just a software project: they were working on a system which matched newly developed software with newly designed mechanics and custom build control electronics. A group of experienced software engineers, mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers all found themselves reporting to a bright and shiny MBA. It's a role that she probably could have grown into, but management saw all the acronyms she continuously put after her name, and decided she could just take the whole thing over with no real guidance.
It went badly pretty much from the beginning. Tegan was not a talented communicator. For example, Mark's team needed to know: on what timeline were the electrical engineers going to deliver the first prototypes, so the software team could start running bench tests of their software? Tegan's response was a fortune cookie message about balancing the complicated pipelines and lanes on the Gantt chart and hitting all of their milestones; like a fortune cookie, it was vague, important sounding, but ultimately empty.
Of course, the natural reaction amongst the engineers was to just route around the damage: the various teams could talk to each other just fine without going through Tegan. That, unfortunately, did not go over well with management. Tegan, as the project manager, was their insight into the project. They needed her in the loop on everything. And she couldn't just be informed, she had an MBA. She needed to be making decisions. But she was unqualified to make those decisions, which meant the project gradually ground to a halt. Tegan's emails got more vague, her meetings got longer but accomplished less, and after a certain point, she just stopped replying to key email threads.
The first few days of radio silence seemed like a gift. But as time passed and Tegan seemed uninterested or unable to reply to any of the questions the team had for her, the project started to flounder. The engineering teams escalated this problem to management. Management presumably went back to Tegan. At some point, feeling the weight of everything going wrong around her, Tegan sent out this email, which is definitely the best and clearest communication she managed during the project. It's arguably the clearest, and most accurate communication one could make in this situation:
Team,
I understand all the issues but there are complex interrelations that must be worked out. I am currently constipated on each issue and will let you know when there is movement.
- Tegan
MBA, CAPM, PMP
Her email cost the project many person-hours as all the engineering teams took a break to have a good laugh about the project manager admitting, in writing, that she was full of crap.
There was, eventually, movement. Tegan moved on to a new position at a different company. Her replacement, Pam, wasn't a new hire, but instead a transfer from another department. She wasn't a great project manager, certainly not worth her weight in gold, but she had enough experience to avoid the worst mistakes, and most important: she was good at regular communication in order to keep things moving.
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