Capstone: leading a troubled project team

This capstone brings the course together in an extended case. You take over a project team that is in trouble: missed dates, low morale, conflict and unclear roles. Working through the case, you will diagnose the team's problems, plan your first weeks, apply the tools from lessons 1 to 11, and then turn to exam strategy for People domain questions. The case and the organization are invented for teaching purposes; any resemblance to real organizations is coincidental.

The case: Project Beacon

Northvale Regional Health is a fictional Canadian health authority. Fourteen months ago it launched Project Beacon to replace its patient referral system with a new platform that lets family doctors send referrals electronically to specialists and track their status. The project has a budget of $6.8 million, a hybrid approach (predictive for infrastructure and integration, Scrum for the referral application) and a team of 16: nine Northvale employees in a matrix arrangement, five contractors from a systems integrator, and two staff from the software vendor, who work from Ireland.

The original project manager left suddenly last month. The sponsor, the vice-president of clinical operations, has asked you to take over. In your first conversations you learn the following:

• The go-live date has slipped twice. The last three sprints delivered on average 60 % of committed work.
• The Scrum team and the integration team blame each other for defects. The integration lead, Ruth, calls the developers "cowboys"; the lead developer, Sanjay, calls the integration team "the department of no".
• Two experienced Northvale analysts are spending more and more time on their regular jobs; their functional manager says the project "doesn't seem to be going anywhere".
• The vendor staff in Ireland say they are rarely invited to decisions and learn about changes from defect reports.
• There is no team charter. Daily stand-ups have become 40-minute status meetings run by the previous project manager, who assigned tasks to individuals.
• Status reports to the steering committee have been green for months.
• A clinical informatics nurse, Mei, who knows the referral workflow best, has told the sponsor she is thinking of leaving the project.
• The sponsor wants a new go-live date within a month and says, "I need this team to start acting like a team."

Step 1: Diagnose before acting

The temptation when taking over a troubled project is to act immediately: announce a new plan, reorganize the team, crack down on the conflict. Resist it. A new leader's first job is to understand, and the team will judge you by whether you listen. The ECO enablers "solve problems" and "break down situations to identify the root cause" apply here.

Suppose your diagnosis produces the following themes, mapped to the lessons in this course.

Step 2: Rebuild the foundation

Several problems trace back to missing foundations: no shared vision, no team charter, no clear decision rights. Lencioni's model suggests starting with trust. A practical sequence is to reconnect the team to purpose, agree how it will work together, and then tackle specific conflicts and performance issues within that framework.

Step 3: Address the conflict between leads

The Ruth and Sanjay conflict has reached Leas's contest level: generalizations, labels and win-lose language. At this level the project manager must step in. A useful approach is to meet each lead privately first, then together.

• Privately with each: listen to their perspective, acknowledge frustrations and ask what they need. Describe the impact of the labels on the team, using SBI.
• Together: set ground rules, define the problem jointly ("defects found late at integration are costing both teams time"), explore interests (Ruth needs stable, tested interfaces; Sanjay needs fast feedback and fewer approval delays) and generate options.
• Agree: for example, integration tests run automatically on every build; a joint interface review at sprint planning; a single shared defect triage meeting twice a week; both leads model respectful language and correct each other's teams if labels reappear.
• Follow up after two sprints and recognize progress publicly.

Step 4: Restore the team's operating rhythm

The stand-up has turned into a status meeting with tasks assigned by the project manager, which undermines self-organization and wastes time. A servant leadership approach returns ownership to the team.

Restoring psychological safety means changing how bad news is received. In your first steering committee meeting, you present an honest status, amber or red where appropriate, with a recovery plan. Telling the team you did this, and that you would rather hear bad news early, makes it safer for them to report problems.

Step 5: Secure resources and retain key people

The analysts' drift and Mei's possible departure threaten the project. Both call for direct action.

• With the functional manager: meet with data on the analysts' actual allocation and the impact on the critical path. Explain the recovery plan to raise their confidence that the project is now going somewhere. Agree allocations in writing and, if needed, ask the sponsor to help resolve competing priorities.
• With Mei: a private conversation to understand her concerns. Perhaps she is overloaded, her expertise is being ignored, or she sees no development path. Possible responses include reducing her load by pairing her with a junior analyst, which also reduces the single point of failure, giving her a formal role in design decisions, recognizing her contribution visibly and arranging a mentor in clinical informatics.
• With the vendor staff: include them in decisions within the time-zone overlap, add them to the team channel and decision log and arrange regular one-to-ones.

Step 6: Communicate the reset

Finally, report the changes: to the sponsor, with a new date based on the team's replanning rather than a date imposed from above; to the steering committee, with an honest status and recovery plan; and to functional managers, with clear resource agreements. Stakeholder communication planning is covered in PMP-121; for this case, the key point is that the new date comes from the team, which raises its commitment and credibility.

Exam strategy for People questions

People questions make up about a third of the exam, and many Process and Business Environment questions also turn on people judgement. The following strategies help.

• Identify the stage of the situation: Has the problem just appeared? Has something already been tried? "What should the project manager do first" and "what should the project manager do next" have different answers.
• Look for the root cause: answers that address causes usually beat answers that treat symptoms.
• Prefer direct, private, respectful engagement with the person involved before escalation.
• Match leadership to the context: coaching and impediment removal for self-organizing teams; direction for emergencies, safety and ethics.
• Use the team: answers that involve the team in solving its own problems, through retrospectives, team charters and collaborative planning, are often best.
• Check for policy, legal or ethical issues: harassment, safety, fraud and discrimination require prompt action under policy, not informal fixes.
• Eliminate extremes: answers that ignore the problem, punish publicly, escalate immediately without trying anything, or change the entire plan unilaterally are usually wrong.
• Read every option: two options may both be reasonable; choose the one that is most proactive, collaborative and consistent with servant leadership and the PMI Code of Ethics.

A final note on preparation: People questions reward judgement built from experience. Reflect on teams you have worked on, good and bad, and ask what the leader did, what they could have done and what the lessons in this course suggest. PMP-160 provides full practice exams and timing strategy.