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Anyone nearby Barclays kharadi?
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a High School Special Education Teacher
If you have your PMP, was it worth it?
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A few things I’ve seen work in similar situations:
- Reframe scope control as a risk management issue, not just a PM function. Tie every change request to tangible impact: cost, time, resourcing, and downstream project health.
- Escalate via outcomes, not complaints. Frame it around delivery risk to the business or other clients - that often gets more traction with senior stakeholders.
- RACI refresh: If you haven’t already, clarify who owns what - especially around approvals and client comms. It’s often where ambiguity causes slippage.
If key internal and external stakeholders are aware of your clear, documented risks, and are happy to continue proceeding, there may be other reasons they are happy to lose their margin or write-off on this project (client relationship/new piece of work for case studies/logo in portfolio/etc). You have then done everything expected of your role.
I wish everyone cared about project health as much as you clearly do!
This is really good advice.
Blame it on the account team for not pushing back and letting it burn out.
@director, one challenge I’ve had in the past is not escalating enough and something about the above advice shared by Head of Ops puts it really well. I find it inconceivable that any reasonable person would think that the entirety of a project is in one person’s shoulders. There is a whole team and the upper people are not getting paid big bucks for no reason. Let them take a little heat and let them share their expertise to help straighten out the bumpy road.
As an aside, I’ve had clients sabotage deadlines and such as well by undoing their approvals, (2 clients clearly competing with each other). At the time I can’t tell you how stressed I was but then started rephrasing emails, like “our deadline to go live is in x days, your prior email said approved and now it says you changed your mind - would you like to ship on time to make the delivery date? Otherwise if meeting the deadline is no issue, let’s start working on more revisions!!”
Was oddly liberating!