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Project Jeopardizer (PJ)

Who are Project Jeopardizers?

As the name implies, these are the people responsible for jeopardizing your projects and accelerating their failure! They gracefully and confidently push projects to drift from their track to the disaster track.

Project Jeopardizers (PJ) AKA Project Monsters are people who have authority and who, for some odd reasons, have a say in your work, and can destroy it completely by the directions they give and the decision they make. They usually help driving projects to their catastrophic ends or in the best cases they lead projects to disastrous situations only! These people run afterwards and disappear from the picture. They also exist in the background of every team project photo.PJ

In most of the cases, PJs think they are doing this for the benefit of the project. They are also the first people who panic in stressful situations and leave everything for others to save. They are also very professional in transferring the blame to others, and they are the ones who steal the credit from others in case of success.

People pertaining to this category can be clients, consultants, process improvement people, auditors, strategy people, top management, middle management and sometimes people from your own team or from other helper functions in the same company.

And above all, PJs are the people who get promoted while good people commit suicides or die early with heart attacks because of PJs!

PJ Job Requirements

PJs should have the following qualifications to best fit in their positions:

  • They should be able lose their e-mails and papers
  • They should have the power to destroy your work
  • They should have the ability to impose additional sudden unnecessary work at any time to overload the project
  • They should be able to convince others that they are working for a greater cause which they don’t understand
  • You have to explain everything to them because sometimes they don’t understand and then they forget
  • They forget a lot and others have to remind them with everything
  • They have to be chased to get things done

PJ Characteristics

They are also characterized by the following:

  • They are very bad listeners
  • They believe they understand everything
  • They believe they have a vision
  • They don’t respect plans
  • They always come up with unplanned activities, extra demos & releases
  • All their requests are important and urgent
  • They believe that assigning more people on the project means it will finish faster
  • They believe that project’s dependencies are deficiencies
  • They think Software is magic, and that they it’s a tool to con clients and get money
  • You have to cover their mistakes and bad decisions, and maybe sacrifice yourself for them

PJ Attitude

Their attitude is always driving you crazy while they try to convince you that it’s your fault!

  • They always “have something else in mind”
  • When you agree on anything with, they do something else, most of the times, totally something different
  • They think that PMs are time wasters, and they deal with them on this basis
  • They enjoy watching you suffer!

How to Deal with PJs?

As a PM you have to absorb everything as it became kind of normal that others try to destroy your work. I tried many ways and tricks to deal with and handle PJs, and I still can’t find a silver bullet advice to end your troubles with them. Among the methods I tried were the following:

  • Escalate on them. This never worked with me as it always fired back on my team and myself
  • Ask to leave the project. Sometimes it works fine, and they are the ones who leave instead of you
  • Think about something else when talking to these people… I was once thinking about the bus and if I will be able to catch it or not, and this made time pass quickly… Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the bus this day!
  • Let them say what they want, then do exactly the opposite. This worked well many times
  • Let them face the problem or the situation and they will retreat or fail. This trick was successful somehow
  • Take some time off, and put them in charge instead of you. This also proved to be good somehow, although this trick has to be used very carefully
  • Quit your job. I did this once, I wasn’t very happy, but it was the only way to get rid of them as there were many of them

The end point is that you have to fight for your project to live… you have to fight for your project to succeed.

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