While most project managers might feel this is the lowest priority of the issues they will have to manage each day, negativity is contagious, and one team member’s chronic complaining will eventually infect others with this behavior and will irritate the remaining ones - in both cases, productivity gets impacted.

Even more corrosive is when the project manager exhibits such behavior.  While most project managers are likely to feel that they don’t possess sufficient formal authority over their projects or team members, they do wield enough influence that their negativity is likely to rub off and impact the productivity of the overall team.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating that everyone on the project has to join hands and sing Kumbaya in spite of how well or poorly things are going.  There ARE going to be issues, some of which cannot be resolved optimally, but what we can control is how we choose to handle these situations.

The book The No Complaining Rule is written around a parable to provide practical approaches on how to tackle the issue of workplace negativity, and while most of the techniques provided by the author are intended to be applied individually or at an organization-wide level, there’s no reason why they can’t be adapted for use at a team level as well.

One way is to institute a No Complaining day each week – team members (including you, Mr. or Mrs. Project Manager!) who complain without providing solutions or without qualifying complaints with positive thought or action are charged a nominal penalty.  The paid amounts will be saved up and used to fund team celebrations or a charitable donation.  Once the team is able to successfully handle one day a week without complaining, increase it to be one week each month, and so on.

If the team is already in the grip of negativity, it can be hard for someone who is as close to it as the project manager to identify, but if metrics such as work item completion velocity are being calculated and tracked on a regular basis, it should be possible to identify productivity declines.  The project manager should also practice active listening with stakeholders or the customer to see if they are becoming keenly aware of the project being a neverending “whine & cheese” party.  Finally, it may be worth inviting peer project managers to sit in on the occasional status meeting – not being directly involved they may be able to pick up on such issues.

To plagiarize (and misquote) a famous Jedi Master: Negativity is the path to the project dark side.  Negativity leads to stress.  Stress leads to reduced productivity.  Reduced productivity leads to project failure.

Most organizations with titled project managers rarely have enough capacity to handle peak staffing situations.  While some of the excess project demand could be managed by functional managers or other senior staff, there may still be one or more projects of sufficient complexity to demand the services of a professional project manager.  Faced with such a need, unless there is sufficient sustained work to justify a full-time hire, a contract project manager may be considered as a quick (though costly) solution.

The benefits of using a contract project manager include:

• Greater time availability to focus on managing the project – contractors won’t have the administrative or operational responsibilities which a full-time team member will have, hence, they will have more hours to work on the project each week.
• Lack of internal political baggage – unless the project manager has already been under contract with your company for a very long period of time, they are unlikely to have any of the biases which employees usually develop and if they are a career consultant, they will likely have seen enough different cultures and environments to know that most issues are common to many organizations and the grass is likely equally yellow.  Their advice or recommendations are likely to be balanced, subject only to their own internal (and not political) biases.
• Lack of job insecurity – over the past decade and a half of downsizing and fiscal constraint, fear of job loss or uncertainty of job stability has created very real productivity impacts for full time staff in most companies.  This is not likely to be a concern for most contractors who recognize that their only guarantee is the termination clause in their contract.
• Greater breadth or depth of experience – Although you pay a higher rate than for an internal employee, an external project manager may bring a degree of versatility, flexbility or in-depth domain knowledge which can reduce the risk to your project and increase the predictability of desired outcomes.  In that context, the contractor’s fees could be considered as a type of insurance.  The one risk to watch for when procuring a “seasoned” contractor is ensuring that while they have twenty years of experience, that it’s not just the same one year of experience repeated twenty times!

While there are benefits in using a contract project manager staffing approach, there are some issues and risks which need to be considered – some can be resolved or mitigated, others not.

• Loss of knowledge – even if knowledge transfer is explicitly built into their contract, it is very difficult to measure the effectiveness of such knowledge transfer, and if push comes to shove, your customer or project sponsor are likely to be more keen on ensuring that project scope is completed on time and on budget than that knowledge transfer successfully occurred.  This is why it may be worth looking at shifting existing assignments such that projects where valuable knowledge will be gained are managed by internal staff and external project managers are used in more of a back-fill mode.
• Ends justify the means – While an external project manager won’t have internal political baggage or biases, they also won’t be as focused on building long-term positive relationships with all stakeholders as an internal project manager would.  What this means is that while they will likely be keen on getting a very positive reference from the customer or project sponsor, they may do so at the expense of their team or key stakeholders by driving results over relationships.  To mitigate this risk, the project sponsor should be held accountable for the project manager’s methods and any evaluation provided to the project manager should take a 360 degree approach.  There should also be care taken during the interview process to assess whether the contractor will “fit” your organization and team’s culture – while the long term impacts of a misfit may be less than for a full-time employee, the short term impacts could still be severe.
• Lack of organization culture & process knowledge – Although the contract project manager may bring significant domain experience relevant to the needs of the specific project, their lack of specific cultural or process knowledge of your company will impede their short term effectiveness and productivity.  This is why it is better to bring a contract project manager on during project initiation or the early stages of the planning phase to avoid creating schedule impacts, and you should also evaluate the criticality of this knowledge to the scope or desired outcomes for the project.

Use of contractors can be an ideal method of resolving project manager staffing shortfalls, but having awareness of the risks of doing so and implementing suitable responses to such risks is critical to be able to benefit from this approach.

In most cases, this may not be the worst thing that could happen – so long as project and functional managers are able to keep their team members focusing on completing the most critical milestones, delays on less important projects might be an acceptable inefficiency.

Where this does become more concerning is when there are multiple genuinely important projects underway and this gets coupled with a work allocation model that has most staff performing operational and project duties.  In such cases, there is a strong probability that at one or more times of the year, there will be a convergence of “can’t miss” milestones across multiple projects conflicting with the completion of one or more critical operational initiatives.

In an organization with lower levels of maturity, this situation can be similar to the chaos that would ensue if a half-dozen footballs were dropped in the midst of an unsupervised group of preschoolers.  In the organizational context, staff will focus on the project milestone or operational activity which has been given the greatest priority by their project manager (in strong or some balanced matrix organizations) or by their direct reporting manager (in functional, weak or some balanced matrix organizations).  Since not each team member will receive the same instructions or priority directions, the risk is high that nearly all milestones will be missed.

To avoid such entropy, the easy answer is for the organization to take on less work - they should cut their coat according to their cloth.  However, this requires a fairly detailed quantitative understanding of staff capacity and capability as well as a governance team that is judicious about project selection & scheduling – both signs of a higher maturity organization.

Failing this, what else can be done?  To quote Mr. Miyagi: “Best way to avoid punch, no be there“.  Try to avoid milestone convergence at all costs.

While the penultimate tool to help achieve this might be a detailed cross-project/operations schedule, this will take a tremendous amount of effort to develop and, in low maturity organizations, it will be out-of-date the moment it has been published.

A simpler approach is for project & functional managers to maintain a list of critical milestones for their project and operational responsibilities for the next few quarters.  The only information required to be captured is the name of the initiative, the milestone description, the true degree of schedule flexibility for the milestone (or rather, the impact if the forecast date slips) and the forecast date.  When developing project schedules or creating operational calendars, project and functional managers should review this list and if they are in a situation where a new milestone will conflict with existing ones, a quick meeting should be called to identify the “pecking order” at the milestone (NOT project or initiative) level, and rescheduling should take place on all other initiatives.  If this can’t be done for a particular convergence point, at least the organization will have a sufficiently advanced “head’s up” to assign additional staff or other such techniques of avoiding contention.

Reducing the number of active project and operational responsibilities for staff is a long term goal for lower maturity organizations, but a good short term objective is to shift focus to key milestones across concurrent workstreams to avoid perfect storms.