PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRACTICE A CASE STUDY ON TEAM MANAGEMENT

It was Tuesday morning and the clock started ticking 11 am, John Gillon looked worried as he skimmed through delivery timeline for various projects in his portfolio. He was wondering how he can ensure smooth deliveries from the Institutional-Billing group.

Background TeleMeck has been a small but renouned IT services and consulting companies in Telecommunication industry. Its Billing & Payment practice group was headed by a company loyalist John Gillon. Having consulted many telcom companies in US and Europe for more than 20 years, John was known as manager with thorough domain knowledge and hands-on experience of various billing systems and payment processes.

The growth record: Under Johns leadership, the Billing & Payment Department has grown multi-fold: revenue was tripled and team size has grown from 60 members to 350 resources. Looking at the strong financial performance in past few years and current size of projects in the sales-pipeline, senior management has entrusted John to expand his practice-group.

The sub-practice group: Thomas McGill joined Billing and Payments department six years ago as a consultant; since then he worked closely with John. Having exhibited high level of commitment, Thomas easily entered into circle of people trusted by John. It was not surprising to see that Thomas got promoted over the years and now as a project manager, he is leading a sub-practice group Institutional-billing and in turn a team of thirty people (Direct + Indirect). Sarah, Silton and Jason are directly reporting to Thomas and they in turn, are managing team size of approximately ten members each. Sarah, Silton and Jason shared very good rapport with Thomas.

Project delivery issues: Though all other things, apparently were looking good, since last couple of years, John Gillon started sensing some problems in the project deliveries. Couple of clients also complained about lack of sound project management practices in his department e.g. A vice president at Erricxen Corporation and a sponsor for couple of projects for Institutional-Billing, voiced problems regarding stakeholder updates, slippage of delivery schedule, quality audits, etc. John Gillon was aware of these concerns. After consulting his colleagues and senior managers, he concluded that

1. His department lacks the expertise in project planning and deliveries. Current team members who have got promoted as project manager were assigned this role purely because department has grown and company needed somebody to manage bigger teams

2. His department needed experienced and certified project managers to streamline project management practices and in turn deliveries. These project managers would also guide current team about best practices in project management.

Solution devised: Hence a year ago, John decided to hire experienced and certified project managers and one such hire was Alex. Alex was certified Project Manager Professional who holds considerable work experience in financial sector. Alex joined Institutional-Billing the sub-practice group sharing project delivery responsibilities with Thomas. Thus Institutional-Billing has got two project managers. Alex was a experienced project manager but he was not an expert in Billing and Payment in telecom domain.

As couple of months passed, Alex realized that he was not able to get correct information about deliverable, resource utilization, their availability, project plan, actual progress & state of deliverable. Sarah, Silton and Jason were not sharing complete picture of what their teams were working on, who was working on what, when would they deliver certain deliverable to the client. As Sarah, Silton and Jason were directly reporting to Thomas, they were not paying much heed to Alexs requests. Alex strongly suspected that Thomas was deliberately preventing his team from sharing/passing on the information. In Alexs opinion, he did not get enough support from the team, which was not listening to him ( team reporting to Thomas).

If PMO or John Gilton ask for specific project data, Alex would remain unsure of the inputs he had provided whereas Thomas was able to provide precise details to the same requests. Yet Alex and Thomass sub-practice-group started facing delivery issues even more prominently delayed deliveries, increased attrition rate, instances of non-compliance with PMO guidelines.

When Alex complained about these issues to John, John advised him to understand the domain well and indicated that Alex has not been able to tackle team properly. Alex was in a fix, that neither he was well aware of the technology, domain, etc to argue about, in the meeting nor he was able to manage the deliveries properly.

Six months later, the same issue prevailed; despite of the fact that Alex tried hard to break silos. Alex has come to conclusion that he is at a wrong place and he would look out for another job. He even indicated the same to John.

The subsequent events in reality:

Alex escalated issues once more to John that he did not have any power (forget about coercive power) to set new practices which team does not comply/support and merely being catalyst of change is not working any more

John refuted the argument that his team members are not ready to change, and he asked Alex to try his level best to implement project management processes (like documenting planning, ensuring quality and auditing all important processes, etc)

Alex came to conclusion that he is knocking wrong door, he asked for Marnas (Johns boss) appointment.

When Alex met Marna and presented his point of views. Marna sensed that current team was resisting new practices Alex was trying to put in place. Till then, Thomas and team were not following standardized processes and delivery was much ad-hoc. Since John has been reporting positive progress and is confident of future business, Marna came do a decision not to interfere with Thomass decision.

Clearly for Marna, If it is not breaking, dont fix it was the mantra of moving forward. Hence she decided not to bring organization change to fix it.

but there was no alternate way in TeleMeck; hence he decided to leave TeleMeck & he actually left.

What do you think? 1. Was Johns decision to induct two project managers for Institutional-Billing sub-practice group, correct? 2. Since Institutional-Billing practices needs to be streamlined, what alternate approach would you suggest? 3. If you were at Alexs place, how differently would you handle the situation?