PM & The Wizard of Oz

As a Program / Project Manager we know what the most challenging aspect of PM is: the people factor.

And, a particularly challenging type of person to deal with I’ll refer to as The Wizard of Oz.

PM’s – How many times have you been in a situation where you are asking important questions about the nature of your project and the response you receive is something to the effect of: Why do you need to know that? I’ve got this covered and I’ll let you know if and/or when you need to know anything else about this.

The questions asked could be technical / product or IT-related (e.g., specifications) or plans (e.g., timelines or milestones related to when the product or system will go through the various stage gates of the release process), etc.

I’ve seen this scenario play out in MANY companies I’ve worked with (and there are dozens upon dozens), over countless projects. To be fair, I wouldn’t say this posturing is organizational (i.e., policy or procedure) but individual. That is, the individual being asked these questions has the perfect opportunity to be a team player and transparently share information to support the overall objective of the program — but they don’t…

To be clear, we (the PM) aren’t asking these questions just for fun. This information is necessary to enable the PM to:

• Fully understand the nature and scope of the project
• Communicate intelligently and cohesively to the various and numerous stakeholders
• Work with stakeholders to finitely map interdependencies across the many work streams

So, this (not willing to share information) is particularly frustrating because we absolutely know these Wizards of Oz:

• Have the information and are simply not willing to share it, and/or;
• The information is not available or ready and they are unwilling to admit it, and/or;
• The information paints a less-than-stellar image of their scope of work and they are hiding…

Which is it? Who knows. But, we’re going to find out (THIS is the fun part 🙂 )

As a PM, we cannot simply let this go. Here are a few things we can do at this juncture.

First, we can try to appeal to the team member’s sense of commitment to the company, by saying something to the effect of: “My only purpose here is to ensure success of the program, for our company. Your area, work-stream and/or deliverable is critical to the program and by my having this information I’m better able to:

• Weave the details into our single, consolidated project plan to ensure all tasks, timelines and dependencies are accounted for
• Talk intelligently about this topic and how it fits into the overall program, potentially minimizing the number of inquiries you would otherwise receive from other team members

If they ask for time to prepare the information, and it is a reasonable timeframe (relative to the timeline and needs of the project) by all means grant them this time.

If, however, they remain unwilling or unable to provide this information we can:

• Let them know that: “Due to the importance of this information, I’m going to have to go up the food chain and get some help. Would you like to contact your manager, or shall I? In addition, this is now a key risk to the program’s success, so I’ll be adding it to our RAID log for project team and executive sponsor visibility.“
• Place this item on the RAID log as a project risk, in that a critical team member is unwilling to share crucial information to support project success. And, this should be something that is brought up IMMEDIATELY to the project sponsor (after the Wizard of Oz’s manager has been engaged).

Bottom-line: Bad news does NOT get better with age. So, if this Wizard of Oz is not willing to let us look behind the curtain, the ONLY assumption we can make is that they are hiding something…

Wizards of Oz – Say it ain’t so. And, show me, as the alternative is I will need to continue going up the food chain, making noise about “our” project risk.

Like most organizations we engage with, if you and/or your team are struggling with ANY aspect of project / program management, feel free to reach out to us. We have decades upon decades of scars of experience that you can tap to help you navigate some of the most challenging aspects of PM.

All the best!