Question

Your manager has asked you to take on an existing project from a peer PM who is leaving the company. As you hold the knowledge transfer, you learn that your co-worker signed a statement of work (approx. $150,000) with an outside vendor with no involvement from strategic sourcing. Additionally, the business requirements have not yet been finalized internally within your project team nor tied to the statement of work. The contract states the work is expected to start within five business days. What steps should you take as the project manager to resolve this?

Answer 1

Project managers have the responsibility of the planning, procurement and execution of a project, in any undertaking that has a defined scope, defined the start and finish.

The main responsibility of a project manager is to plan, procure and implement the project in any sort of undertaking having the predefined scope, start and finish dates. For having an effective approval, creation and following up of the statement of work for a given project, all the individuals who are going to be involved in the work statement are required to be allocated the proper roles and responsibilities. One of the main reasons for having disputes among the different project parties is not to have a proper and well developed and executed statement of work. As in the case presented, the co-worker who has signed the work statement did not have any participation of all the responsible stakeholders who should have been informed along with the members of the project team and if we look at the project management guidelines, then such an act is not permissible.

As the project is to be initiated in five days and all the different aspects of a statement of work of the project are not understood by the project team members so that no conflict can arise, so there will be two options. First, I would like to breach all the points of that statement of work being the new project manager and in fact, I would like to initiate and make a new statement of work which will have the participation of all the members of project team and management.   It is quite better to have a delay in the project initiation so that any sort of conflict can be avoided rather than delivering a substandard project.

Secondly, I can call the emergency meeting of all the project team members and explain them the gravity of the situation. In order to initiate the project within five days, I would ask the opinions of different team members and then after brainstorming, some suggested solutions can be adopted. Apart from this, I will also explain the expectations, role an responsibilities of each and every member in this meeting and thus will ask team members to provide their opinions about the resources, assistance and help which might be required by them for the fulfilment of their responsibilities. I will appoint a team leader who will be responsible for taking care of the team activities and coordination among the team members.