Your critical path is a relay race
I wrote a new article this week. It starts with something I have observed many times over the years. Most project managers learn critical path management somewhere early in their career. They build the Gantt chart, identify the float, maybe create a work breakdown structure. And then go back to managing the project the way they always have.
That is not a criticism. It is simply what happens when a concept stays on paper.
What I wanted to explore is what critical path management looks like when you stop thinking of it as a scheduling technique and start thinking of it as how you architect the entire delivery process. From the first conversation about handovers to the moment a BAU team you have never met tells you their backlog is two months deep.
The analogy that works best, in my experience, is a relay race. You are the coach. Your runners are your specialists, your consultants, your client teams. And the race is not won by making individual runners faster. It is won at the handovers.
The article goes through what that means in practice. How to provoke the process into revealing itself. Why the next team needs to be running before the baton arrives. What happens when your critical path crosses organizational boundaries and you are effectively running a relay with athletes from two different national teams.
There is a section on bottlenecks that I am particularly fond of, drawing on something I learned growing up on a horticultural farm. And a section on what happens when a runner takes off without the baton, which in SaaS delivery looks like a client testing team that was told to create test scenarios but was never shown what a good one looks like.
If any of this sounds familiar, the full article is on the blog.
Read the full article on pm-guidance.com →
Did you know
A BAU team, such as the security office, that feels your disorganization landing on their desk as an urgent problem will disengage faster than almost anything else. The vendor PMs who navigate this well do the opposite. They come prepared, give as much lead time as possible, and make the ask easy to fulfill.
That approach earns you something. When you have genuinely done the work, communicated early, and made their involvement as frictionless as possible, and the reality still does not fit your timeline, you have standing. You can take that situation into your governance without it reflecting on you. Present it factually. Then let the people with the mandate decide.
Your organization is not the priority of the rest of the world, and that is a reality. Making their process as easy as possible is the way to get the best outcome for yours.
What is happening at PM Guidance
A few things worth sharing.
The free book, Managing Successful Stakeholder Management for SaaS Delivery, is available for download on the website. It covers what misalignment actually costs your project, how to read your stakeholder landscape, and what emotional and mental clarity have to do with delivery. If you have not picked it up yet, it is a good starting point.
I am also working on something new. The Stakeholder Clarity Builder is an application designed to help vendor PMs work through stakeholder situations in real time. Think of it as a thinking partner that draws on 25 years of delivery experience to help you see what is going on, figure out what to do about it, and prepare for the conversations that matter. It is still in development, but I will share more as it takes shape.
That is it for this edition. If something in the article resonated, I would genuinely like to hear about it. Reply to this email. I read everything.
Paul
