Wolf&Grayson EditorialProject management’s a funny thing. Everyone thinks they’ve got it figured out until deadlines start slipping and budgets explode like a firecracker. That’s when the finger-pointing starts and suddenly no one knows who’s steering the ship. It takes someone who’s weathered these storms to spot the real warning signs, someone who’s spent decades watching companies stumble over the same obstacles. After 36 years in the trenches and now leading one of PMI’s biggest chapters, James McCoy has a few things to say about when it’s time to wave the white flag and call in the pros.
Spotting the Warning Signs
Nobody plans to fail. But James learned the hard way that failure’s usually the great teacher. “One reason why we evolve is our failures,” he says, leaning on decades of watching projects go sideways. You know the signs – deadlines whoosh past like missed buses, budgets stretch like rubber bands, and nobody seems to know what’s going on.
Working with both Fortune 500 giants and start-ups showed James that size doesn’t matter when it comes to project troubles. Big or small, when standards go out the window and efficiency take a nosedive, something’s got to give. Projects don’t just fail – they fail in patterns. Miss enough deadlines, blow enough budgets, and pretty soon you’re not looking at bad luck anymore. You’re looking at a system that needs fixing.
Identifying Systemic Failures
Then there’s problem number two – when nobody can see the whole picture anymore. James hits this one head-on: “Having visibility across all your projects… a lot of times they’re disparate, especially in bigger companies. Everybody does things their own way.” It’s like trying to put together a puzzle while everyone’s holding different pieces in different rooms. Big companies make this mess even messier. Each department runs its own show, using its own methods, following its own rules. Before long, you’ve got a dozen different ways of doing the same thing, and nobody knows what anyone else is up to. Projects crash into each other, deadlines clash and money disappears into the gaps between departments.
Tackling Visibility Challenges
But here’s the killer – the one that keeps project managers up at night. James calls it like he sees it: ineffective resource allocation is “the biggest challenge that project management or companies try to face.” It’s not rocket science – you can’t just overallocate resources without a plan and expect everything to get done. But companies try to regardless. The fallout gets ugly fast. “If you’ve got lack of efficient resource allocation, conflicts will arise.” James explains. Teams end up stretched thinner than ever before. People get pulled in six directions at once. Multiple projects start competing for the same resources, and guess what? Nobody wins the fight.
Overcoming Resource Allocation Issues
So, when do you know it’s time to bring in a PMO expert? James boils it down to three signs you can’t ignore: “Frequent project failures delays/cost overruns, lack of visibility across all the projects that you’re trying to do and then thirdly, all the noise that you hear from ineffective resource allocation.” Certainly, every company hits rough patches. But when projects keep face-planting, nobody knows what’s going on across departments, and your resource allocation looks like a game of musical chairs – that’s not a rough patch. That’s a broken system.
James has seen enough train wrecks to know the difference between a hiccup and a heart attack. Sometimes you need more than a band-aid. Sometimes you need someone who has spent decades learning how to fix these exact problems. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about preventing every problem – it’s about knowing which problems you can’t afford to ignore and not ignoring the problems.
To learn more about James McCoy and his approach, check out his LinkedIn profile.
