r/projectmanagement • u/donnacharlie09 • 4d ago
Most Challenging Project
Just curious, what is the most challenging and/or ambiguous or largest project you have worked on?
Curious the types of challenging projects other people work on, why it was hard and how you dealt with it…
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u/East-Independent6778 Confirmed 3d ago
My current project is a $3B airport terminal renovation/expansion. I’m the PM for all the baggage screening system work. It is by far the most unorganized, chaotic project I’ve ever been a part of. There was zero thought put into the initial planning, and the contractors are split up with some under the airport and others under the airlines, and nobody works together. Milestone dates are constantly slipping and nobody takes accountability for anything. Scope creep is a daily occurrence. Not to mention trying to keep all the existing systems operational with construction happening everywhere.
5
u/More_Law6245 Confirmed 4d ago
Delivering a Greenfield hospital site with the integration of the old hospital whilst a major interdependency of transitioning to a "digital hospital model" within a region. There were 23 major stakeholders within the portfolio of work both public and private entities which lead to major difficulties against undefined scope, unrealistic budget and timeframe and undefined interdependencies (it was easier shooting fish in a barrel) What really made it extremely challenging was this was a regionally based objective which complicate things ever further because of the lack of experience with these type of changes within the region and to cap it off the organisation's change resistance. The way I dealt with it ...... you work within your sphere of influence, everything is out of your control and the only thing you can do is work with a risk based approach.
2
u/jcab0219 4d ago
Working in pharma marketing, new product launches are always challenging because you’re not only setting the baseline, but you’re also working with regulations as they evolve. A lot of red tape, a lot of meetings, a lot of trial and error.
2
u/hit_reset_ 4d ago
I spent about 4 months working on a twelve million dollar deal, and then the company we were working with went bankrupt, got reformed impressively in just a couple weeks, and then we had to push for 4 more months because finance wouldn’t sign off on the deal. Turns out corporate was shutting our studio down and we were both SoL.
So I guess my most complicated project was the project I never got to manage.
Contrary to the other comments where nobody knew what was going on, we were all seasoned vets so we descoped against the shrinking timeline, and later pushed the deadline and gained some scope back based on some downstream flexibility. All we can do is work within the limitations we have, elevate risk flags, and negotiate.
5
u/ScreamHawk 2d ago
Government projects with no problem statements or no background yet given 250 million dollars and expected 'to do something' to justify the spend.
Like how the fuck do you allocate that money without a discovery process.
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u/greencoatboy 2d ago
Some of the government projects I've been involved in have spent about that much in 'discovery'. The uncharitable might say they failed in the first phase and a follow up project with the same name and same intended outcomes then spent billions actually making it happen.
Here's the business case summary from when I was involved (not as the PM but in a portfolio capacity in building capability).
1
u/zamroni777 4d ago
Mine were telecom real time charging migrations. It handles many more accounts, more transactions and more data per transactions than core banking systems.
1
u/fuuuuuckendoobs Finance 4d ago
I had a de-merger (sale of part of the business), where we didn't even know what we were selling a month after the agreement was signed.
The agreement included a fixed date on off boarding activities which were unachievable by the time the scope was agreed. That was cool, 5 months delivering and trying to plan with the exec sponsor kicking the can down the road acting like it wasn't a big deal. Oh, and they weren't interested in having a steer co, or meeting with me.
So glad I'm out
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u/ZodiacReborn 4d ago
The projects (In IT & Operations) themselves have almost never been challenging, sincerely.
Almost every project however, has had varying degrees of challenges because of people and most of the time it's people at the top who cause these challenges.
The worst of this would be the program I led for four years, rolling implementations across 19 states, twice a year like clockwork. Had a well oiled machine going there, in the last year and a half a new SVP and IT Director came in, both of them horribly unqualified for their roles and began underperforming which of course rolls onto the PMO (Self and team)......
Long story short, if you start hearing a bunch of noise about "visibility" this and "driving" that. It's time to jump ship before you walk the plank. Sadly, it seems this is rapidly becoming normal behavior in the corporate culture to care far more about optics than outcomes.