The director asks you in for a conversation and says that from Monday, for two weeks, there will be someone from outside in the project. They are there to “help sort it out”. You stay on as project manager, nothing changes.
You leave the room knowing that everything has changed. Someone has decided you can’t cope on your own. The team will find out tomorrow. The client probably already knows.
I have been that person from outside. Below is what I tell the project manager on day one, and a few things I usually don’t say and should.
This is not an assessment of you
I know that is how it looks. In most cases the decision to bring someone in is made for a different reason: the sponsor has a leadership review in two weeks and nothing to walk in with. They need a picture the room will believe. A picture from someone with no history of their own in the project is easier for them to defend.
Projects rarely get stuck because of one person. They usually get stuck on things the PM has no influence over: decisions that don’t get made, scope nobody defends, and people split between three subjects. Often the PM has been saying so for months and nobody listened.
What that person really needs
For the first few days someone from outside knows less about the project than anyone on the team. The only person who can change that quickly is you.
They need three things from you. A list of what has been promised, and to whom. A list of the decisions you are waiting for, with the date since which you have been waiting. Your own answer to the question of what you would change if you had the mandate to do it.
The third is the most valuable. Nine times out of ten the project manager knows what is wrong. They just had nobody to say it to in a way that would be heard.
What you can get out of it
The person from outside has something you don’t: for two weeks the sponsor listens to them. That ends when they leave, so it is worth using.
If you have been asking for a decision on scope for a quarter, say so on day one. If you are missing a person who was promised at the start, say that too. These things will go into the report as the findings of someone independent and will suddenly become urgent. The report itself will most likely follow the structure a sponsor update needs, so it helps to hand over your points in that shape.
Outside help done well ends with the PM holding more than they held before: a closed scope, decisions made, clear rules with the client.
What not to do
Don’t prepare a defence. A presentation showing that everything was done correctly takes two days and changes nothing, because nobody is asking about blame.
Don’t hide what is uncomfortable. The person from outside will find it anyway, usually on day three, in a conversation with someone from the team. Better that they hear it from you, along with the context.
Don’t disappear. Some project managers step back for those two weeks so as “not to get in the way”. Then the findings are made without them and are hard to put into practice afterwards.
What to ask on day one
You have a right to know the terms on which this is happening. Ask three things outright.
Who runs the project after the two weeks? If the answer isn’t “you”, it is better to know straight away.
Who tells the team and the client why this person has come? Ideally you say it together, in one sentence.
Will you see the findings before they go to the sponsor? Help that is run honestly shows them to the project manager first. If you hear “no”, that tells you how this cooperation is going to look.
What is left after two weeks
The person from outside leaves. The project stays with you, together with the decisions that have finally been made and a plan that now has to be carried out.
If those two weeks went well, you are in a better place than before them. If they went badly, it is usually because both sides spent the first week checking whether they could trust each other instead of working.
One question for this week
If tomorrow someone independent asked you what you would change in your project with a full mandate, what would you answer? Who can you say that to today?
All situations described in this article are based on real events, but contain no company names, no individual names, and no data from any specific project.
