This week: when the party’s over
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #44 – When the party (project) is over:
We’ve been working for 7 months on a proof of concept development effort. The job of my team (all 20 of us) was to build a working prototype for a new kind of web application. It was a start-up type effort, highly creative, big challenges, high energy and lots of fun (and hours). But yesterday in our more recent executive review I learned that the project would likely be canceled. We hadn’t failed, but the direction of the company was no longer likely to go where we thought.
My team is in the dark. This is the first I’d heard about us not growing into a real product team. We were led to believe that if we delivered, we’d be the core of the true v1.0 team, and we’ve delivered.
I’m not certain how/when to roll this information out to my team. The decision isn’t final yet, but things do not look good and I’d rather my team was eased into this rather than thrown off the organizational cliff. If the project is canceled, it’s unclear what will happen to my team.
Signed,
What to do when the party’s over?
Hi,
Having been a PM for a while, I have seen this a number of times. Teams working for defense companies know that the political or ego wind can blow a project off the chart, no matter how well the team is doing. Try to get the company to allow you and the team some time to “close out the project”. This provides a chance to review and document the good work, acknowledge that change happens, and provide time for the team members to look for new projects.
If the decision is truely still “pending”, you may want to use the time to sound out the other project managers to see if they have open spots.