Sponsors, customers, and management all expect projects to deliver what they promised, for the price promised, by the date promised. When they perceive that progress isn't in line with expectations, they can apply pressure to the project team, and that pressure can itself become a hindrance.

Freeway damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta, California, earthquake. Unexpected events often have unexpected consequences.
Photo by U.S. Geological Survey courtesy Wikipedia.
Here are some insights about the unexpected that can help with managing and preventing pressure. See "Managing Pressure: Communications and Expectations," Point Lookout for December 13, 2006, and "Managing Pressure: Milestones and Deliveries," Point Lookout for December 27, 2006, for more.
- Educate everyone about the inevitability of setbacks
- When a setback happens, perceptions of progress can change permanently, even if the setback is eventually overcome, and even if time lost is recovered. If customers or sponsors have to report the setback to people who have great organizational power, they are sometimes subject to personal consequences.
- Outside the context of any specific project, educate sponsors and managers about setbacks. Explain that because project work has either never been done before, or has never been done by this organization, setbacks are inevitable. When setbacks happen, be open about them. Hiding them or spinning them puts your own credibility at risk.
- Be wary of near-delivery setbacks
- Setbacks just prior to delivery are especially problematic. Customers might have made preparations for the delivery and those arrangements constitute both financial and psychological commitment. A setback just prior to delivery creates embarrassment, frustration, and irritation, which can lead to distrust and perceived lack of progress that are otherwise unwarranted.
- Monitor internal status carefully just prior to any delivery. As soon as you know of problems that put delivery at risk, pass the information along. Help people mitigate the consequences of slips, and commit to all this in the project plan.
- Keep loads uniform
- Setbacks just
prior to delivery
are especially
problematic - Uniform loads create a sense of steady progress. Load variations, especially spikes, degrade assessments of progress. For instance, if a project undergoes a crisis requiring an out-of-plan management decision, management endures a load spike. Afterwards, the incident isn't forgotten - it usually lingers in the form of degraded perceptions of progress. Similar effects occur within the project team.
- When trouble looms, inform management early, to give them time to prepare for decision-making. Balance the loads on project team members carefully, making schedule changes as necessary — if you can — to keep loads uniform.
- Don't expect breakthroughs to erase anxiety
- Breakthroughs usually seem less significant than setbacks of similar magnitude. Hyping breakthroughs to enhance morale, or to correct perceptions about progress, probably won't work — people tend to discount such announcements because they tend to serve the project's leaders' interests.
- Use breakthroughs instead to enhance the status of the people who achieve them. Honor them and recognize them. You'll do more for morale that way than you can accomplish by trying to send the all-is-now-well message to skeptical audiences.
Next time we'll look at managing pressure by means of defining milestones, deliveries, and their spacing. Top
Next Issue
Are your projects always (or almost always) late and over budget? Are your project teams plagued by turnover, burnout, and high defect rates? Turn your culture around. Read 52 Tips for Leaders of Project-Oriented Organizations, filled with tips and techniques for organizational leaders. Order Now!
Micromanagement is a common source of pressure. For insights on micromanagers and micromanaging, see "When Your Boss Is a Micromanager," Point Lookout for December 5, 2001; "There Are No Micromanagers," Point Lookout for January 7, 2004; "Are You Micromanaging Yourself?," Point Lookout for November 24, 2004; and "How to Tell If You Work for a Nanomanager," Point Lookout for March 7, 2007.
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
Breaking the Rules
- Many outstanding advances are due to those who broke rules to get things done. And some of those who
break rules get fired or disciplined. When is rule breaking a useful tactic?
Scopemonging: When Scope Creep Is Intentional
- Scope creep is the tendency of some projects to expand their goals. Usually, we think of scope creep
as an unintended consequence of a series of well-intentioned choices. But sometimes, it's much more than that.
Obstructionist Tactics: I
- Teams and groups depend for their success on highly effective cooperation between their members. If
even one person is unable or unwilling to cooperate, the team's performance is limited. What tactics
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Behavioral Indicators of Political Risk
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An Introduction to Workplace Ostracism
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that group or excluded from participating in that group's activities, and when we might otherwise expect
that person to be a member. Workplace ostracism can have expensive consequences for the enterprise.
See also Workplace Politics, Conflict Management and Managing Your Boss for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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And on April 28: The Self-Explanation Effect
- In the learning context, self-explanation is the act of explaining to oneself what one is learning. Self-explanation has been shown to increase the rate of acquiring mastery. The mystery is why we don't structure knowledge work to exploit this phenomenon. Available here and by RSS on April 28.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group