Have you ever had people pitch an impractical project idea? You see lots of issues, but the idea hangs around like an overly friendly albatross. Maybe a senior leader is convinced it has merit but doesn’t understand the practical obstacles to delivering business value. Or people think delivering the project would be easy, but the project reality is chock-full of risk.

Here are some things you can do to handle this situation:

• Don’t say no. It typically isn’t the project manager’s place to say no to a project idea. If you did, you would be seen as an obstacle. Don’t take yourself out of the game.  
• Gather and present the numbers. Instead of saying no, perform due diligence. Gather initial estimates, assess the probability and impact of significant risks, and gather project histories for what has worked and not worked in the past. This fact-based evaluation, with projected costs and potential benefits, will show the project as viable or folly.
• Compare your findings with AI results. Prompt your AI tool to obtain costs, durations, and issues that similar projects have experienced. After verifying the AI results, you might have strong evidence that the project is impractical or feasible.
• Seek to understand the urgency. A project idea that won’t go away might come from a deep-seated concern or a perceived opportunity, especially when the idea persists despite numbers that don’t tell a good story. Determine what’s motivating the person’s passion for the idea. With this insight, you might be able to suggest an alternative project that addresses the motivation but with a more compelling business case.
• If the sponsor says go, support the project, and highlight risks. Senior leaders have the prerogative to take a risk if they consider it appropriate. As project manager, you can’t say no. Instead, clearly communicate the risks the sponsor is taking and suggest strategies for mitigating them. Be especially diligent about risk triggers and manage the project as confidently as possible. Taking risks can lead to great outcomes, so keep an eye out for opportunities to realize business value.

Coming Up

I finished recording live action videos for Project Management Foundations course last week.  A couple weeks away from LinkedIn Learning taking over production work!

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 106,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Most project risk conversations focus on what’s happening internally, like scope, resourcing, and schedule constraints. But some of the biggest threats come from outside the business, from people and forces you can’t control. Here are some external risk areas that can catch even experienced project managers off guard. 

• Vendor and supplier lead times. When you’re relying on external contractors to start work at a specific milestone, their lead times could change significantly. The six-week lead time they told you in January could become ten weeks by March if their capacity shifts, and they’re unlikely to tell you about it unless you ask. To avoid surprise delays, communicate with vendors regularly and review any schedule changes.
• Third-party approvals and permits. Legal reviews, building permits, and regulatory signoffs are outside of the project team’s control and can completely stall a project. The mistake is treating permit approvals like a task you can manage, when really this task is sitting in someone else’s queue. Do research to identify regulatory lead times, ask about current lead times when establishing the project schedule, and build in a time buffer for any regulatory approval task.
• Outsourced IT and infrastructure changes. Technology support and maintenance changes, like network upgrades, system migrations, or applying security patches, often occur on a fluid schedule.  These activities can break assumptions that your project schedule depended on. An IT planned server maintenance window you didn’t know about could wipe out the weekend of work time you counted on to catch up on delayed tasks. To avoid this type of surprise, work closely with all support teams to  make sure the latest infrastructure schedules are reflected in your project timeline.
• Currency fluctuations. Currency swings can affect international projects or those that require components purchased overseas. A project that met business justification parameters in Q1 can look very different by Q3 if currency fluctuations increased your actual costs. Make sure you have risks and contingency funds set aside for unexpected cost changes.
• Product delivery charges. Schedule delays might require expedited shipping to get back on track. This could mean unexpected charges from the transport vendor. Make sure you have risks and contingency funds for shipping cost variations.
• Weather and seasonal factors. Weather impacts are obvious for construction projects but are easy to overlook in other projects. Shipping delays around holidays, staffing gaps during flu season, and office closures for weather events are easy to forget in contingency plans. Make sure your project has the equivalent of flashlights and rain gear baked into the plan!
• Partner dependencies. Joint ventures, integration partners, and subcontractors on someone else’s payroll can help your project but add the risk of lack of control. Partner’s internal politics and priorities become your risk the moment project work depends on their delivery. A partner reorganizing their team midstream can quietly reset the project timeline without any official notice. Ensure a balanced benefit and risk analysis is performed when the project depends on partner behaviors.

Take a recent project of yours. Did any external risks come up? Even if they didn’t, think about whether the project could have faced an external risk. Here’s a great place to use AI: ask your favorite tool to provide you with possible external (and internal) risks that your project might face!

For more about project risks, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Risk course.

Coming Up

I finally finished updating the scripts for the Project Management Foundations update! My office is set up for recording, and the sample video is waiting for feedback from the LIL production team. I’ll be recording voiceovers as you read this.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 106,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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A practical project timeline is a brilliant way to deliver your project’s value when it’s needed. There’s no place for optimism. It has reasonable estimates with a degree of variability built in so any issues that arise don’t lead to a scheduling disaster! Here’s how to build one:

• Use PERT instead of single-number estimates. PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) makes you think through the best, worst, and most likely time estimates for each task. This approach yields a better, more thought-out result, which exposes the uncertainty that a single value estimate hides. The PERT weighted average tends to be closer to reality. It also gives you a basis for conversation when a task estimate doesn’t look right. That’s usually a sign the work isn’t well understood and needs further analysis.
• Learn from project histories. Historical data is often underused. There is a lot to learn from project histories. If a similar task took twice as long as planned on the last three projects, there’s no reason to think things will be different this time unless something has changed significantly. Pull actual values from past schedules. (None of our memories are as good as we think!) This technique is also a good way to catch systemic issues, like a particular type of task consistently causing problems, or a vendor who consistently underestimates the time to produce deliverables.
• Use an AI tool to double-check your estimates. Generative AI tools can provide a sanity-check for a draft schedule. Feed in the task list and ask it to find suspicious dependencies, optimistic durations, as well as steps that are missing entirely. Remember, AI doesn’t replace human judgment and the team’s expertise, but it’s a fast second opinion to check before you debut the schedule.
• Make sure the team members doing the work provide your estimates. PMs, sponsors, or team leaders who haven’t gotten their hands dirty in a while tend to be optimistic, so they aren’t the ones to estimate a practical schedule timeline. The person who’ll perform the work usually has firsthand, current knowledge of the true complexity of the work. Also, estimates from team members builds ownership and buy-in. If a task runs long, it feels like a shared problem to solve rather than a target someone else set.
• Build contingency into the plan as a whole and do that openly. When every task owner pads their estimate or the project manager arbitrarily doubles an estimate (you KNOW you have seen or done this!), the schedule ends up bloated, but somehow still unreliable That’s because no science has gone into building a reasonable timeline. A better approach is to use PERT estimates for each task and then include a visible contingency at the phase and project level. That provides flexibility to manage the inevitable surprises. Also, because it’s visible, it provides reliable information about what happens during the project – which makes project histories even more useful. It also provides a succinct and defensible answer when a stakeholder asks if or where wiggle room has been built into the schedule.
• Re-evaluate the schedule at every milestone. A timeline built at the start of a project is a best guess, when few hard facts are available. Regularly revisit estimates, dependencies, and the critical path. When possible, use rolling wave planning, where the near-term work is detailed and the future work is estimated at a high level. When that work becomes near-term, you know more and can produce better estimates. That way, you won’t over-commit to numbers that are still part conjecture.

While this week’s suggestions are worthy of being put into practice immediately, I have another assignment for you to ponder. Give yourself permission to learn from your experience in every project. Remind yourself that the initial baseline schedule (as well as the whole project plan) isn’t fixed! There will be changes. So, think about how to convey that to the people who want to set scope, budget, time and quality; and develop your personal approach to embracing and wrangling the uncertainty that is project management.

For more about scheduling, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course.

Coming Up

It’s official! I’ve started a complete rework of my popular Project Management Foundations course. It was the #4 most popular LinkedIn Learning course in 2025. And the improvements and enhancements we’ve planned might notch it higher in the rankings.

In this edition, I’m narrowing the focus to project managers’ most important responsibilities, key skills, and effective techniques. It will also emphasize the practical aspects of how everything helps you deliver successful projects in the real world. That will get you going quicker and make your efforts more effective. In addition to videos, the course will include text to provide background info, infographics for high-level perspectives, and AI role play to practice common PM situations. There will be two levels of challenges: easier ones for people newer to project management and others for project managers who want to move up. And the content will also be in line with PMBOK® 8th edition.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 105,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Delegation is a great way to free up your time while helping others expand their capabilities. But merely handing off a task to someone else often doesn’t accomplish either of those objectives. Proper delegation is an intentional transfer of ownership that requires shifting the workload, authority, and data necessary to complete the task. Here’s how to create a support structure to guide the delegate:

• Define their decision-making authority. The person you assign might be hesitant to act or lack confidence to grab their task with gusto if they don’t know how much authority and autonomy they have. Task execution can affect budgets, project timelines, risk and issue strategies, and more, so you know that decisions will need to be made. Tell your delegate exactly where their decision-making power begins and ends. That way, team members feel empowered and accomplish much more when they know they can decide without waiting for a green light.
• Help them build relationships. Success comes from teamwork, especially cross-functional collaboration. However, a newly delegated team member might not have the relationships needed to succeed on their tasks. By proactively building bridges for them, you give them credibility, increase the probability of good results, and even save time.
• Communicate the task ownership change. Inform stakeholders that a task has been delegated to make sure that it receives the proper priority — as if you, the project manager, were still spearheading it. When people know about the shift in task ownership, they won’t (or are less likely to) question the delegate’s right to drive the task forward and hold others accountable.
• Get them technical support. Make sure the delegate has access to key technical and team leaders. The most meaningful delegations stretch the delegate’s skills, so access to specialized help when needed helps the delegate learn while completing the task successfully. Make a list of specific experts and message them, asking them to prioritize inquiries from your team member.

Have you ever delegated a task to someone else or had a task delegated to you? Any stories or lessons learned from those experiences? I’ll give you an example from my younger years. I took over as project manager for one part of a huge program. Basically, the delegation was “This is Bonnie. She’s going to manage our part of the project.” No knowledge of authority, relationships, or technical support. At least the client knew I was on board. I figured out the authority, relationships, and technical support on my own, but it took several very stressful months.

For more about delegation, check out Dorie Clark’s Delegating Tasks course.

Coming Up

It’s official! I’ve started a complete rework of my popular Project Management Foundations course. It was the #4 most popular LinkedIn Learning course in 2025. And the improvements and enhancements we’ve planned might notch it higher in the rankings.

In this edition, I’m narrowing the focus to project managers’ most important responsibilities, key skills, and effective techniques. It will also emphasize the practical aspects of how everything helps you deliver successful projects in the real world. That will get you going quicker and make your efforts more effective. In addition to videos, the course will include text to provide background info, infographics for high-level perspectives, and AI role play to practice common PM situations. There will be two levels of challenges: easier ones for people newer to project management and others for project managers who want to move up. And the content will also be in line with PMBOK® 8th edition.

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 105,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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