Dear Bob ... I just recently started a new job as a project manager in a rapidly growing development team. It has doubled in size in less then a year, including new executive leadership. Previously all programmers did their own business analysis and project management work. Now they've added a layer of project managers. So I'm in a new company, in a newly created position, which is also a step up for me, with a Dear Bob … I just recently started a new job as a project manager in a rapidly growing development team. It has doubled in size in less then a year, including new executive leadership. Previously all programmers did their own business analysis and project management work. Now they’ve added a layer of project managers. So I’m in a new company, in a newly created position, which is also a step up for me, with a decent amount of resistance. The organization has a frantic pace: My 3 projects were assigned to me on my first day, all have some pretty aggressive deadlines dictated from above, and all are “inter-team” projects which makes them even more complicated to manage. What is a reasonable time frame to expect to get acclimated? How do I hold on until that happens? – Treading Dear Treading … Wheee! Welcome to the rollercoaster. My first question is, are you experiencing decent executive sponsorship for your project? With it you have a chance. Without it … you’d better figure out how to recruit a strong sponsor. Because walking into projects with pre-established, aggressive deadlines isn’t the prettiest picture a project manager gets to face. You’re almost certainly going to have to lead the company through some difficult decisions about scope, budget, schedule and risk. You can’t succeed at that by yourself. You’ll need executive backing. With inter-team projects you might not be able to have a single sponsor. All that means is that you have to form a steering committee to serve in the sponsorship role. Regardless you need this – you need to move the key stakeholders out of their natural role of critic and into the less comfortable role of collaborators. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself on the defensive, proposing solutions nobody wants to hear about instead of describing alternatives from which the business has to choose. And you’ll find yourself trapped at the end of the effort without anyone in a position to agree with you that you’re done now. What’s a reasonable timeframe to become acclimated? I’d say a month. The problem is that you don’t have it so you’ll have to find ways to compress the what-the-heck-have-I-gotten-myself-into phase of things. Make a list of every external stakeholder in the three projects and schedule a formal one-hour interview with each of them to help you get a handle, not just on the formalisms, but on the underlying organizational dynamics that will come into play after it’s too late. Also try to get a feel for how receptive each of them is to project management as a discipline. Some will welcome it, some will view it as unnecessary bureaucracy. You have to know who’s who. Be careful to make no commitments during these conversations, and to avoid the appearance of taking sides. Many of the people you talk to will pose pseudo-hypothetical questions to you and ask your opinion about how someone ought to behave in that situation. Don’t answer – if you do, they’ll go back to their political opponent and use your words as ammunition. No matter how tired you are, summarize your notes at the end of each day. Otherwise you’ll forget half of what you learn. Spend enough one-on-one and group time with the project teams to start getting them on your side. Some of them will welcome what you bring to the party as helping them stay focused on getting their work done. Others will view you as an intruder. To help remedy that, consider drawing a clear line between what business analysts and project managers do, and leave as much BA work to the developers as possible. Chances are good many of them considered their project management responsibilities to be an annoying distraction anyway. And finally, no matter how stressed you’re feeling, keep, if not a smile, at least a lopsided grin on your face. Rather than “Om,” make your mantra “relaxed and confident.” If you create the impression that the situation really is manageable after all – that you know what you have to do and in what order to get everyone through it – you’ll get most people on your side fairly quickly. Good luck, and remember the wise words of a project manager friend of mine who found herself leading something of a death march. She put a big sign on the wall that read, “This is fun and we’re having it.” – Bob Technology Industry