Crisis Management for Project Leaders

Introduction

Regardless of whether a project manager has put a great plan in place, implemented a superb monitoring process, and wrapped everything in robust controls, things will still go wrong.

Some of these issues will be minor and can be addressed quickly and quietly within the project without outside assistance.

But others will be far more serious and often need people to drop everything and focus on them. These are called crises and will need special management.

What Causes a Crisis?

A crisis will often appear quickly and unexpectedly. They are caused by several different factors, such as: 

• The project has poor or unclear objectives, which have caused confusion and have resulted in poor planning, insufficient contingency in the plan, a vague scope (or even scope creep), missing tasks, missing dependencies or unrealistic timelines.
• There are poor controls in place around issues, progress or risk monitoring, which means items were not identified and/or managed early enough.
• There are constraints around resources, such as insufficient staff, skill gaps, budget overruns, lack of access to people, poor technology and so on.
• There has been poor communication, which has resulted in,
  • Misalignment between stakeholders, teams, or departments.
  • Lack of clear roles and responsibilities.
  • Poor documentation and information sharing.
• Leadership is poor, which has resulted in indecisiveness, micromanagement, lack of delegation and conflicts between people and/or teams.
• There are poor dynamics between teams and people, which could cause morale issues, employee turnover, staff burnout, lack of motivation and limited accountability.
• There could be cultural or interpersonal conflicts within the team.
• There are technical challenges due to unreliable technology, system failures, integration issues with existing platforms and poor-quality control leading to defects or rework.
• Finally (and this is the most common from my personal experience) are unexpected external factors such as regulatory changes, missing regulatory rules, market changes, economic downturns, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters and geopolitical issues.

Managing a Crisis Needs a Clear and Structured Approach

Any crisis can be very messy, complex and stressful. Therefore, a clear, structured and controlled process must be followed (undoubtedly very quickly) to ensure that their situation is understood and corrected as quickly as possible.

1. Don't Allocate Blame

It is very tempting to start pointing fingers and allocating blame, especially if it's obvious who is at fault, particularly if some people will need to work late or for weeks to fix the problems. 

However, if people start to allocate blame, it only increases emotion, stress, and tension on top of an already awkward situation and will not help in fixing the problems.

2. Allocate a Crisis Manager

Somebody must be put in charge of managing the crisis.  

If it is a project, then it typically would be the project manager or their management if the project manager is at fault. For a non-project, it could be somebody like an ops manager.  

However, regardless of who does the work, this person needs to have the time, authority, and skills to manage the crisis. 

3. Inform Key Stakeholders that a Crisis Exists

One of the key elements of managing the crisis is effective people or stakeholder management.  

This means that people need to be informed about what is happening and are kept up to date regularly. Remember, in the absence of news, people often try to make up their own, and it is nearly always negative.  Once rumours start, they will be very hard to close down.  

Therefore, as soon as someone knows that a crisis is occurring, the relevant stakeholders need to be informed immediately.  

Ideally, this should be done verbally, although this is not always possible. Regardless, one should always follow up with an email to ensure there is no misunderstanding.  

This initial communication does not need to be complex and detailed (often because you don't know all the details), but it could be something as simple as "Due to a delay in Task A, then deadline B will be missed. The team is assessing this situation now and will report back in XYZ hours". 

4. Understand the Situation, Causes, and Impact

There is also the temptation to start and try to fix the issues straight away, often without understanding what the real issue is and what the causes are.  

While this sounds good in theory (especially if management is pressuring you to fix this immediately), there is a real risk that taking any action without understanding the issue, its impact, and/or its causes will make things worse. Therefore, it's important to obtain this understanding before doing anything. For example, "Tasks A, B and C on the plan will be late, which means the functionality required at the end of the year will not be delivered." 

This understanding can be gained in several ways. The most common way is to hold a call (or VC, in today's post-COVID world) to determine this, although a series of 1-2-1 chats does work, but can take some time. 

Regardless of the approach, all the relevant stakeholders need to be involved in the process, and the focus should be on understanding the issue and its impact and trying to understand the causes as much as possible. This means the manager of the crisis will need to have good interpersonal skills to ensure any meetings are focused on the facts and avoid any emotions and/or finger-pointing as much as possible. 

5. Stabilise the Situation and Implement a Temporary Fix

As most issues or crises take a while to fix (or even understand), it is important to stabilise the situation as quickly as possible. This is important to:

• Provides an amount of comfort that the situation is being managed.
• Buys you some time to fix the issue properly.  

As part of this stabilisation, it may be necessary to implement a temporary or bridging fix.  For example, if a regulatory return is missed, can you consult with legal advisors (or even the regulator) to determine if there is a way to work around the missed return? Alternatively, if a piece of software is going to be delivered late, can a manual process be used in the interim to ensure that the go-live date is met, with the missing software being delivered as part of the day 2 release? 

6. Keep Stakeholders Informed

As noted earlier, stakeholder management is key. Therefore, people must be kept in the loop regarding progress. This means that regular communications must be sent. There are no hard-and-fast rules on this.  But typically, when a crisis is in its early stages, communication may need to be sent several times a day. However, once the crisis is under control, the frequency can drop to every couple of days or even weekly. 

7. Work on a Permanent Solution

Once the situation has been stabilised and everything appears to be under control, then the crisis needs to be addressed permanently.  

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules for this, but it could involve replanning, scope changes, creating a phased delivery, increasing the budget, changing staffing and so on.  

It is important to ensure that any temporary or bridging solutions are removed.  Using the example earlier, if a manual solution is implemented to 'work around' some missing software to safeguard a go-live date, then this manual solution will eventually need to be removed and replaced by the missing software. It is amazing how many temporary solutions end up staying in place for many years. 

Post-Mortem Analysis: Learning from the Crisis

Once the crisis has passed and a sense of calmness has returned, everyone needs to step back and see if any lessons can be learned to minimise similar crises in the future.  

Again, there are no hard and fast rules, but the following may help: 

• Project Governance: Are there better ways to ensure that objectives are clear, plans are more robust and that there are valid policies around tracking issues and risks?
• Staffing Issues: Are the staff fully trained? Are there any skill gaps? Are there enough staff? And are they skilled in specific areas of change, such as conflict management?
• Processes and Controls: Are all processes and controls in place, and if so, do they function effectively, and are people following them?
• External Factors: Finally, are all external factors being sufficiently monitored, such as changes in regulations?

The results of this post-mortem should be issued to all stakeholders for their review, buy-in, and support in implementing them. 

In Summary

Crisis will always happen, and therefore, change managers will need to be able to cope with and manage them.  

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules, but hopefully, the points listed above should provide people with the suitable structure and skills to cope with anything that is thrown at them.