No Surprises!

Opening a holiday gift and finding tickets to the big game. Surprise!

Telling your manager the day of the deadline that the deliverable will be late.  Surprise!

Oops. Not all surprises lead to delight and happiness.

This week I spoke at Humber College to students completing a project management program. I shared some tips for success based on real work lessons learned. One of these we call “No Surprises!”

Sometimes project managers are hesitant to tell their managers or the client about problems until they’ve done their best to resolve them. The risk is that you spend hours or days struggling with the problem to no avail. By then you’ve burned through budget and wasted valuable time. What was a small issue when it was discovered has ballooned into a major crisis now that the deadline is looming.

Think about it this way. Your manager has access to resources and information that you don’t have. He or she may be able to tap into an expert from another group who can solve the problem in an hour. Or, he may be able to decide that the affected portion of scope isn’t essential after all, and can be removed from the project. The key is to escalate the issue early – while there’s still time to do something about it.

Keeping stakeholders informed is essential. You don’t always know how your project fits into the bigger company strategy, how your status reports are being incorporated into senior management discussions, or how the outcome from your project is going to be used as an input to another project.

That’s why we say save the surprises for holidays and birthdays.