COVID-19, considerations and steps

There is no doubt that we are dealing with worldwide force Majeure that is impacting everything and everyone, sometimes we face crises that might have a financial or economic impact, the nature of the crises itself is what defines how we will manage it.

We are dealing with a crisis that is threatening human lives, even if it's not directly affecting the close network, it's indirectly affecting everyone else and from this point, we should consider “Leading” our project team and consider less “Managing” them.

It’s important for every project manager to carefully assess the situation according to the surrounding environmental factors and understand the team nature as human beings, along with understanding the project status and the impact on the project due to this force Majeure, its important to show support and empathy to team members, speak to them individually and figure out what they can offer along with knowing their capabilities and potentials considering their official obligation to work without introducing an extra pressure on them as human beings.

An assessment should be made about what can be done remotely without having to go to the workplace, and reprioritize the plan according to it with the help of the team, this assessment should be resulting in an updated flexible plan containing a new sub-plan or section with offshore activities assigned to resources and from it, you can get an insight about the overall duration and the progress that can be done before an actual delay can be reported.

As projects are usually progressed by human teams, at this point there is nothing definite and no one knows what can happen tomorrow, as project managers we need to be open and flexible to different probabilities without introducing more pressure on those who we are working with, also an efficient communication strategy needs to take place with clients to keep them updated with the effort being done and setting expectations with realistic yet proactive steps and measures.

Eventually, we will have to continue working as long we can, we will have to deal with different obstacles that we face now on daily basis and from it we have to change our direction, being agile, flexible, proactive, having ownership toward our work and be open to learn new things that help us do our work will help a great deal on minimizing the impact of this crisis.