Unable to clean — no input provided

Management

Summarize the facts of the case.

Pam Hall, an experienced systems analyst, was put in charge of a project to create fiscal programming for the Division of Social Services in her state. It was crucial that this project be completed on time. Although she understood the parameters of the task, she had to balance the conflicting needs of team members who had other responsibilities in addition to those of working on her project. Since they were evaluated on their other work and not how they performed on Hall's project, they were reluctant to make Hall's task a consistent priority. As a result, the amount of time they put into the task varied over time. One third of the way into the project it looked as if it might not be done in time.

Hall used a variety of approaches to try to gain more commitment from the departments involved with varying success. Finally she basically threw a temper tantrum, and while the job then got done on time, team members resented her approach,.

2. Evaluate Hall's effectiveness as a project manager. Include assessment of both strengths and shortcomings.

Hall showed both strengths and weaknesses as a project manager. She apparently showed good initial planning, working out a timeline with her supervisor. However, while she could predict problems, she did not always find good solutions. When she did not gain the full cooperation of the departments that necessarily had to cooperate with her, she didn't always pick her best options. Since she planned the project with her Division director, she might have included that person in her early problem-solving. This person was probably the equal of the managers who needed to release their people to work on Hall's project. He or she might have been a more effective negotiator to make sure that inter-departmental cooperation was sustained over time. He or she could also have made sure that Hall's status as manager for this project meant that she should have the clout to get the cooperation she needed.

Instead, she went to these people herself, and when this was ultimately unsatisfactory, she called a meeting where she yelled at people instead of exploring what the problems were and how they might have been solved. If Hall had talked with her team in a courteous and problem-solving way, they might have been able to tell her exactly what the problems were and even have offered solutions for her. One obvious part of such a solution would have been for Hall to participate in the team members' job evaluations. Then they would have had a personal as well as a professional interest in doing a good job. Instead, when they finally got seriously to work on the project, they did so grudgingly, and the final project had an unacceptable rate of flaws which would take additional time to correct.

3. How should she improve her performance to better manage similar projects in the future?

It seems possible that Hall believed that since she was in charge of this project, she should not need to seek any kind of support or assistance from the Director who gave her the assignment. Perhaps she thought it would reflect badly on her if she had to come back to the Director for more guidance after their initial planning. She could have gone to the director and said something like "I think we have a good plan here, but there may be some internal issues we haven't explored completely. I would welcome some feedback from you on why these problems are occurring and what I might do to resolve them." If she had done that as soon as they first surfaced, the Director would likely have seen her as someone who recognized problems early and saw the need to solve them promptly even if she didn't yet have all the answers on how to do this. Hall should have realized that how well she did on this project would also reflect on her Director. For that reason, he or she would have motivation to help her sort out the problems before they grew more difficult to manage. Hall's greatest flaw as the leader may have been her reluctance to admit that she needed help to her Director.

4) Would you fire or promote her (and why)?

I would neither fire nor promote Hall at this point. The Director should have realized that he/she had placed Hall in a new and unfamiliar situation. They (Hall and the Director) should have been meeting on a regular basis, not only because Hall might need the guidance but because it was an important project and one the Director needed to be up to speed on at all times. Hall, new to project management, might well not have recognized that need herself. Hall was not given a promotion with this task. However, she was given considerable extra responsibility, and it seems possible that she did not get enough support from her own department, which may have contributed to her difficulties. It seems that her range of authority was not clear, both to the people loaned to her by other departments and to the people running those departments. This kind of communication is not something she could have reasonably accomplished, since the task assignment did not come with a promotion. Hall did not always handle things perfectly, but she is not alone in that regard.

Hall does not deserve to be fired, but she is also not ready to be promoted. However, if interdepartmental responsibilities are made more clear in the future, Hall might turn out to be a very good project manager and a good candidate for promotion.

5. Evaluate -- in an overall way -- the use of project management by the Division of Social services.

Based on Hall's experience, it seems possible that the Directors of the various departments within the Division of Social Services may engage in some level of "turf wars," at least sometimes. If this is so, Hall's project would be a perfect situation for such interdepartmental positioning and posturing to occur, because her authority was less than clear. Hall most have some real strengths, or her Director would never have given her the task, and yet she herself did not seem to clearly know what authority she had to make sure the job got done. Obviously the was the leader for her team, but her team members did not report to her. It seems very clear that interdepartmental cooperation may not have been the norm at the Division of Social Services, because consistently, the team members chose work from their own departments over the demands of the disbursement project, even though they clearly knew the deadline. It seems unlikely that Hall would not have communicated that to them.

Hall apparently went into this task assuming that others would see it as she did -- an urgent job requiring whatever it took to get it done on time. However, her own chain of command was clear: her Director gave her this job. All the other teams had split loyalties.