Project work can be tough. Project management can be really difficult, and take a lot out of you. I’m sure you’ve all had your fair share of tough projects, but can you remember your hardest one?

I remember one of my most difficult was a major infrastructure rollout project. It involved people within the business, and a contract with a large external supplier to provide most of the technical work.

Everything went fine through the procurement stages of the project, when there was a tight team inside the business. Once we actually got to the rollout stage, though, problems started to arise.

The problems were nothing that couldn’t have been expected, and the kind of thing that happens with any infrastructure work, particularly one which requires civils work (digging of trenches, gaining permission from landowners, and so on). Delays occurred, because delays will always occur when you are dealing with numerous separate organisations, all with their own drivers and timescales.

Unfortunately, I was a relatively inexperienced project manager, and had an Executive who was even more inexperienced in project work. I failed to explain adequately the realities of project work, and his frustration with the project diverging from the original plan made a year ago grew and grew.

Ultimately, this led to the Executive attempting to impose the management style he used internally onto the external supplier, who was not happy with this. The loss of trust and the breakdown of the relationship meant the rest of the project was a constant battle.

That project taught me that managing my Executive was at least as important as managing my team (something Elizabeth Harrin talks about in a recent blog post on managing up). But the price was a stressful and unpleasant year or so, for me and the rest of my team, and extra work trying to repair relationships and morale on an ongoing basis.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t actually my hardest project! I’ll tell you all a little about that in a future post, but I’m curious as to what you have found to be your hardest project. What happened that made it so hard? What did you learn from it? And what would you do differently now?

Photo courtesy of stuartpilbrow. Some rights reserved.