The Honest Truth

The Honest Truth (artilce from PMNET)

I received my March PMNET, PMI’s magazine for project managers. I was attracted to a piece on managing stakeholder relations by Shelinea Somani with a subheading “Do the benefits of open dialog with stakeholders outweigh the risks”?

The simple answer is “of course” and Somani gave an example where the answer applies and, of course, everything turned out for the better. I have known many of project mangers that often shielded important stakeholder from important information. Most of the time it was because the project was slipping, either in cost or schedule and the project manager had every confidence that they had the ability to make up the deficit before anyone would know and just as often they were wrong. The result was a project over cost or behind schedule and a client who had lost trust and confidence in the project manager. On occasion I saw project manager replaced.

Other situations can be more difficult. You have agreed to give an employee who is an alcoholic a second chance after being removed from their previous project for drinking. You discovered that critical material for your project will be late because the supplier has prioritized another project for your company. You agreed that you would be at the remote job site for a month nine months from now and just found out your wife is expecting at the same time. Do you tell your client?

My default position is yes, you tell your client. Trust is one of the most your important assets. Without the trust of your client, your team and your management communication will become very difficult if not impossible. There are always exceptions but those exceptions should always be rare and the kind of exception that is found out, your client would understand.

This is one of those topics that deserves some thought and some real dialog with more difficult choices in the PMNET would have been helpful.