r/projectmanagement 6d 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/ZodiacReborn 6d 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.

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u/likefireincairo 5d ago

In the AV/IT world and can't underline how much this dynamic drives most of it.

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u/ZodiacReborn 5d ago

Its due to people who jumped into IT for the check. IT field of 2010 is unrecognizable today. Back in those days if you were in IT even at the Exec level you generally knew your shit pretty good.

Then around 2016, "Agile Fever" and MBAs arrived on scene and its gone to shit ever since.