Question

You are a project manager working on a single large project for a year. You get a call from your project's sponsor. The two of you have a good business relationship. You're exactly 2 months away from the project hard deadline and she wants the deadline bumped up by 3 weeks. She says it is due to an unforeseen market change an it is critical-so much so that the project will be worthless if it is not received by the new deadline. You know that meeting this new deadline will be particularly challenging due to some personal vacations and training plans that your project team members had planne during this timeframe. What do you do?

Answer 1

In this case, project deadlines has been bumped up by 3 weeks instead of 2 months which can be a challenging task for the project team as they already had plans for the coming week. Even though it is going to be challenging task as a project manager one must ensure the given deadline is met as postponing it might take a huge toll over the success of project due to market change and can make it worthless. In this situation, as a project manager one must :

a. Explaining team members about the situation and making them understand how important is it to complete the project on the given deadline by the project sponsor.

b. Training plans made for the project team need to be either transferred to later date or cancel it due to unforeseen issue making it difficult for project team to attain training and work on deadlines simultaneously.

c. For the employees who had vacations planned, project manager can provide other fringe benefit to motivate them to work efficiently.

d. In this situation, it is utmost important to motivate the team member and make them ready to meet the new deadline.