Project management consultants are not typically called in when things are going well; it’s a little like being invited to a party that is already tanking or a game where the home team is losing. No one’s in a good mood, and no one particularly wants you to be there. Sure, projects are “manageable;” if, by manageable, you mean that they are chaotic, in crisis, over budget, and off schedule. And this is right where we come in.

Project management consultants tend to walk into the middle of chaos. We typically find that the executives don’t like what’s going on; they do not feel they’re getting the results they should; budgets are out of sort… whatever the reason, there is – understandably – a lot of pressure to quickly develop corrective action. In an ideal world, here is what we’d do:

• Ask questions. Lots of questions. Get input from executives, managers, and team members as to the state of the project, problems or challenges they’re facing, objectives of the project , scope, business requirements,  governance structure , roles and responsibility structures , etc.
• Run diagnostic tests to try to pinpoint the problem(s)
• Develop in-depth understanding
• Create a plan of action to get the project back on track

Imagine that you are an ER doc. You have a patient come in; he’s hemorrhaging badly and breathing rapidly. His thigh bone is protruding through the skin; he has hit his head and may have a concussion; the accident may have affected his spinal cord and mobility. What do you do first? You have to triage: stabilize the patient, stop the bleeding, and then treat injuries as you can. Working on the spinal injury first won’t help if he bleeds out. Setting the bone before you make sure his breathing is regulated doesn’t make sense.

The point is that you don’t have time to adjust; you have to get in there and start doing something of critical value. It is classic triage. The learning curve is significantly sharper. You tend to cut the niceties and get to the actions that will have the biggest, quickest impact so that you can start making an impact and regaining control immediately. This may involve breaking down deliverables, creating an organizational structure, populating leads – whatever it is, you have to stabilize, stop the bleeding, and plan your next move.

There is a balance that has to be achieved; on the one hand, executives and stakeholders want the problem fixed now. We want time, input, diagnostics, and answers. Managers and team members want us to leave. No one gets what he wants! Instead, we all make tradeoffs. We take action to get us through the crisis point so we can figure out how the project will be managed eventually.

When you find you are bleeding, your first course of action is not to figure out why it started; it’s to stop it. Once you do that, you can start working on the hows, whys, and what nexts.