Recovering from the Departure of a Critical Team Member

Rarely do all members of a project team participate from start to finish of a project. As a result, it’s important to have a procedure ready to handle the departure of a critical team member. Here’s a template for the steps to take.

1. Take a deep breath. Get those endorphins flowing to enhance your creativity and problem-solving skills.
2. Mentally commit to moving forward. This is a common occurrence that project managers handle all the time. It’s not the end of the project.
3. Consider the extent of the loss. Think about the level of experience and knowledge you’re losing. Don’t exaggerate its impact. Identify exactly what this team member brought to the table. Capture their specific contributions, decisions they made, and commitments they made to stakeholders. Pinpoint the gaps you need to fill and when. On the bright side, losing a valuable team member often prompts another person to step up.
4. Develop the questions you need to answer and schedule a handoff session. Use the session to address pending decisions, undocumented agreements, and potential political landmines arising from their departure. Get introductions to their key contacts while they still have influence. The key here is to recognize that there might be gaps in documentation of what they know and also that their replacement doesn’t know it all.
5. Press management for a replacement. Investigate options both internally and via contract. Prepare impact statements regarding how delaying their replacement affects the project schedule. Then, when the new team member is on board, prepare a short project brief for them that highlights wins, the current status, critical milestones, and insights from the handoff session.
6. Pay extra attention to stakeholder management. Losing a critical staff member can rattle stakeholders. It might create political issues, as others might try to take over the influence the departing person had. Connect with key stakeholders and reaffirm their and the project team’s commitments.
7. Adjust expectations. The departure WILL have an impact, like delays or production errors. Evaluate and share any setbacks without making them sound like a catastrophe. Develop and discuss plans to help the replacement to reduce negative impacts. If the project schedule is affected, be specific about the support you’ll need to get back on track.
8. Diligently maintain project control documents. A team member change can require changes to control documents to make sure the team and stakeholders remain in synch. Schedules might change; new risks might result; cost might change to cover the replacement person. These changes need to be identified, monitored, and communicated to make sure perceptions of project outcomes match the new reality.
9. Be prepared to manage emotions. Change of any type can produce emotional responses from stakeholders and team members, whether they are reactions to reduced project outcomes or disruption of a high-performing team. Start by acknowledging and validating people’s emotions and concerns. Give them the opportunity to talk about them. Help people maintain a positive outlook by focusing on the benefits of the project. Ask team members questions like “how can we address this?” or “what’s the takeaway?” to help them identify solutions.

Write up your procedure, so it’s easy to find when this challenge arises.

For more about resource management, check out Chris Croft’s Managing Resources Across Project Teams course.

 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 102,000 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.

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