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Hi everyone, it's Ricardo Vargas. Hi everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I would like to talk to you about what we should do when we have a change in a management position in our project, for example, the project manager or a critical team member who just decided to leave or someone that I need to let go. What happens? First, as I said before, what is critically important is that it's not good to change the project manager in the middle of a project. And, I know that companies need to do that for other reasons. But there is a very big price tag when we talk about changing the project manager. And I'm not saying this because I want routine and this is not at all. But there is a big issue with accountability. For example, if you change your project manager in the middle of a project, what happens traditionally is that the incoming project manager blames everything on the former project manager. So saying everything is wrong because that project manager was incompetent, was unable to do that, and the one that is leaving saying, look, I left everything fine. The new project manager is messing up everything. It's very, very easy to do that and you need to protect the project against this. And how do you do that? For example, if you are a member of a PMO or a project management structure, what is critically important for you, for example, is that you keep your documentation, you keep your project files ready and nicely prepared.
And why I'm saying this? Because it's it becomes a nightmare for an incoming project manager to find things where everything is messed up. And I'm not saying that you should do a bureaucratic process to create paper. No, not at all. For example, if you are using JIRA, if you are using Trello, ClickUp, or any of these tools, you just need to keep your project organized in a way that other people, for example, if it's in Agile understand what was the result of my last sprint? What was the result of my last retrospective? What kind of lessons learned I have? Which are the challenges of the project in general? You need to get this. But if everything is such a mess that you cannot get that, it's like you assuming, uh, to be a pilot of a spacecraft where you don't have anything in your instrument panel. It's very painful and very, very risky for the incoming project manager. So this is the first thing. The second thing is about stakeholder management. You need to be able to manage different stakeholders. Remember when people hear that the project manager left, everybody will raise uh, I would say some concerns about that. And how you dismiss that, how you handle the perceptions of the stakeholders. This is absolutely critical.
And this drives me to the third point, communication. Because honestly, for me, changing a project manager in the middle of the game or in the middle of the project is a crisis. It can be a super micro crisis, and it can be a crisis to such a point that if your project is in trouble, then it becomes in deep trouble, not only in trouble. So the way you manage this transition means a lot, means truly a lot, uh, for the project. So you need to communicate extremely well with clarity, giving the reasons to avoid gossip about the reasons for departure and the reason for the change. Trying to remove that and remember one thing if you do not communicate, informal communications will take the place of formal communications and what will happen? You know the concept of fake news, I would say gossip, everything will dominate your organization. It will dominate your project and will be very detrimental to the results of your project. So always think about that. Remember, a change in the project manager is not a change from John to Anne, from Anne to Gabriel. No, not at all. It's not just a change in the game, it's a change in the whole dynamic of the project. And you need to be very aware to avoid any missteps on that. Think about this and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
