Solving Unexpected Problems

It's one of the most important skills for project managers. Ability to deal with unplanned situations is crucial for someone who wants to become a project manager. I believe this ability differentiate good candidates from poor ones.

It’s a soft skill and it’s hardly definable in detailed way. I can imagine a couple of good problem-solvers who do 95% things in vastly different way. It is so, because there is usually more than one good way to achieve a goal. There’s no single path you can always follow to become a problem-solver. For example supporting yourself with signed agreement isn’t the best way to choose in every situation. Nor is doing always whatever customer asked you to do.

I can’t define what exactly the ability to deal with unexpected situations is, but when I think about that three more things come to my mind: experience, knowledge and flexibility. I’d say that problem-solving is cross-skill of those three. The more experienced you are the less issues are unexpected and more likely you were in similar situation before. The more knowledgeable you are the bigger are chances you’ll take the right decision. And last but not least, the more flexible you are the more possible solutions you can accept.

I thought it was obvious, but after a series of recruitment meetings with candidates for project manager I had to change my mind. Problem solving is for most people hammer-like task. When your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail. When a solution doesn’t work, take a bigger hammer.

It doesn’t work like that. E.g. we have a project where we used our hammer (the agreement) in two situations. In the first time it worked well. When we did it for the second time, we found out that the problem wasn’t really a nail, so the effect was rather opposite to what we planned to achieve. One issue was connected with payment terms, another with responsibility for delay. Looked similar for me, but they were not. Even though, we were talking with the same people on the other side.

Another situation which happened to me during last days was taking over the maintenance of a big part of a project from a subcontractor. There were still a guarantee (which we paid for by the way), but our cooperation was going rather poorly. The easiest solution was to exploit agreement and expect the subcontractor would do the work. We’ve chosen to take it all on our back, which wasn’t so easy because of the size of the project and limited resources on our side (as we hadn’t been prepared to do that). We’ve left everything behind and for now we have no claims whatsoever. Problem solved. Case closed.

Issues like above allowed me to increase my knowledge (as I know more about some people and customers) and experience (as I dealt with some new problems). I guess you have to make some mistakes to learn how to be a good problem-solver. If you’re also flexible it shouldn’t take a long time.