There’s a kind of project that doesn’t fail with a bang. Nobody shuts it down and nobody announces a failure. It just gets a little less every month: less time at the steering committee, fewer people, less of the sponsor’s attention. The PM does everything by the book, reports go out on time, risks are documented, and the project is still slowly being starved.
For a long time I looked for the cause of situations like this inside the project itself. Only with time did I see that it often sits one floor up, in a place the PM usually doesn’t look.
Two vocabularies in one company
In many organizations, the PMO and the board talk about projects in different languages.
The PMO asks whether the project is on plan, whether it’s within budget, whether reports come in on time and whether the agreed methodology is being followed. These are reasonable questions, because the PMO is responsible for keeping the project portfolio predictable.
The board asks something else: does this project move us toward what we care about right now? And what the board cares about changes faster than the project portfolio. Six months ago the priority was growth, today it’s costs. A year ago it was a new market, today it’s keeping the customers we already have.
As long as both vocabularies describe the same projects as important, nobody sees the difference. The gap opens when the board has shifted its attention and the PMO portfolio hasn’t followed yet. A project can then be green in every PMO report, a status that hides more than it shows, and at the same time stop mattering to anyone at the top.
How to tell your project has fallen into the gap
Imagine a project to roll out a new order management system. It started as the board’s pet project, because the company wanted to grow faster. A few months in, the board changes course toward cutting costs. Nobody says the project matters less, but the PM starts noticing small things:
- the sponsor moves the monthly meeting, once, then a second time,
- at the steering committee the project lands at the bottom of the agenda and gets five minutes,
- a request for an extra person for testing sits without an answer,
- in conversations, “how much longer will this take?” comes up more and more often, and “what do you need?” less and less.
None of these signals means anything on its own. Together they say the project has lost its place in the head of the person who decides on resources.
Why the PM is the last to know
The PM looks at the project from the level of the plan. Feedback comes mostly from the PMO: reports accepted, indicators within range. From that perspective, everything adds up.
A change in the board’s priorities is rarely announced. More often you see it in what the board spends its time on, and the PM can’t see that from the project level. The sponsor usually knows, but doesn’t always want to talk about it, because admitting the project has dropped in the hierarchy is also a bit like admitting that they have dropped too.
The PMO often finds out late as well. Not because it does its job badly, but because its tools measure what was planned, not what the board considers important today. The portfolio gets updated at the quarterly or annual review, while the board’s attention can shift in a single meeting.
By reflex, the PM responds to the first signals the way they were taught: they improve the reports, add more detail, describe the risks more thoroughly. All of that goes to the PMO, which is happy with the project anyway. Nothing new reaches the board.
What the PM can do about it
The PM won’t close the gap between the PMO and the board, because that’s not their level of decision-making. What they can do is stop pretending the gap isn’t there, and at least make sure their project isn’t quietly starved.
First step: ask the sponsor directly, one on one, not at the steering committee. The question “is the project still important?” won’t get you anywhere, because every sponsor will answer “of course.” Ask instead: “what is the board focusing on this quarter, and how does our project relate to it?” That’s a hard question to answer with a generality.
Second step: translate the project into the new vocabulary. If the board is talking about costs today and your project was justified by growth, check what the project does for costs. Sometimes it’s quite a lot, only nobody has calculated it, because there was no need at the start. Sometimes it’s nothing, and that’s valuable knowledge too.
It’s worth moving that translation straight into your sponsor update. Instead of another indicator that mostly interests the PMO, add one sentence at the top that connects the project to what the board is talking about today. For example: “the new system shortens order handling time, which with the current team size means we don’t have to hire extra people for the peak season.” That’s a sentence the sponsor can take into a board meeting and repeat without any preparation.
Third step, the hardest one: if it turns out the project has no place in the new priorities, say so out loud before someone else does. Come with a proposal: reduce the scope to what makes sense today, pause, or close. A PM who comes forward with that kind of proposal keeps their credibility and a say in what happens to the team. A PM whose project collapses under them after months of being starved is left with a project everyone remembers as a failure.
One question for this week
Think back to the last three meetings where the board or the sponsor talked about the company’s priorities. Was your project mentioned by name? If yes, you’re in a good place. If it didn’t come up once, this is a good moment for a one-on-one with your sponsor, before the project starts getting less and less.
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.
