Editors Blog – Intro for Bad Project Management (or Managers)

With all the award shows and Project Manager of the Year (PMOY) selections at this time of the year, it makes you wonder – What about an award, like the Razzies, for the Worst PM of the Year?

So what would be the characteristics of a bad project manager?

1.  One who either allows scope creep – or has no idea of the actual scope of the project
2. One who creates a schedule but never tracks to it – or never creates a schedule in the first place and prefers to “shoot from the hip”
3. One who overlooks budget items – or never worries about the cost of the project
4. One who is more concerned about finishing on-time and within budget than providing a quality solution – or who leaves this area to the QA and QC teams
5. One who feels that the team is secondary to themselves in importance – or places all responsibility on the team and assumes none for themselves
6. One who only communicates the good news – or never communicates at all
7. One who identifies risks but never creates contingency plans – or never worries about risk because ‘*%#’ always happens.
8. One who pushes all responsibility to subcontractors for their delivery without oversight – or who is unethical in procurement decisions.
   
   

As Project Managers I am sure that none of these have applied to us personally, but we have seen these behaviors in other project managers.  Are these some of the reasons that over half of the projects fail?

I am sure that each of us has our own horror stories of what could be considered bad Project Managers – or it is really just aspects of poor performance by project managers?

Over the next few weeks we have asked our contributors to share their thoughts about characteristics of a bad project manager.  We encourage you to share your experiences on the subject.