Case 1 - The coordinator who owns the deadline but not the people
Priya manages a patient-portal upgrade at a 900-bed hospital. The organisation is a weak matrix: the four developers and two testers on her schedule still report to the Applications Support manager, who sets their objectives, approves leave and owns their appraisals. The sponsor, the CIO, delegated the project but chairs a steering committee that meets quarterly; the last meeting was 11 weeks ago. In week 6 the support manager reassigned both testers to a payroll incident for three weeks and did not tell Priya - she discovered it when the test execution report showed zero progress for four consecutive days. Go-live is fixed by a regulatory reporting deadline in 14 weeks, and the vendor's interface build is 9 days late. Priya's risk register lists resource contention as medium probability and medium impact with no response strategy; she has raised it in three status reports with no recorded action. Her charter names her project coordinator and gives her no budget authority. The PMO handbook distinguishes coordinators, who track and report, from project managers, who direct and control. Two clinical leads have missed both requirements workshops.
1. What does the charter wording and matrix structure imply for Priya's authority, and what should she do in the next 48 hours?
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What the structure implies
The charter is the source of authority, not Priya's personality or effort. A weak matrix plus a coordinator title usually means responsibility for delivery without directive authority over functional staff: she can track, report and influence, but the support manager controls allocation. The 14-week regulatory date is a commitment she cannot control resources to meet - a classic authority-responsibility gap.
Next 48 hours
- Quantify the impact before escalating: 2 testers x 3 weeks = 6 person-weeks of test execution lost, mapping to which test cases and which acceptance criteria will be unverified at go-live.
- Go to the sponsor, not first to the functional manager's boss. In a weak matrix, escalating over a peer usually fails and damages the working relationship she needs afterwards. Ask the CIO for a specific decision: amend the charter to project manager with named committed resources, or issue a written delegation of authority for the final 10 weeks.
- Hold a short negotiation with the support manager proposing one tester returned within 72 hours and a named deputy.
What not to do: wait for the quarterly steering committee (too slow for a 14-week deadline) or silently absorb the loss and hope overtime closes it.
2. Is the tester reassignment a resource problem or a prioritisation problem, and what exactly should Priya ask for?
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It is a prioritisation problem. The same organisation owns both the payroll incident and the portal testing. The support manager made a rational local choice with no view of the regulatory deadline. No amount of rescheduling by Priya fixes that; only someone above both workstreams can rank them.
Ask for, in writing:
- A decision on relative priority between the payroll incident and portal test execution, taken by the sponsor or portfolio owner - not by Priya and not by the support manager alone.
- One tester returned by a named date, plus a backfill or contractor funded from the project budget if the payroll incident genuinely cannot wait.
- A standing rule for future conflicts: any reallocation above two days requires a 48-hour decision from the sponsor, logged in the issue register.
Supporting actions: move resource contention in the risk register from no strategy to a mitigation with a named owner and trigger date; open an issue in the issue log with the date discovered; record the 6 lost person-weeks as a schedule impact, not just a complaint.
Why this framing: a bare request for staff sounds like turf conflict. A request to adjudicate priority is a governance decision the sponsor is accountable for and cannot easily defer.
3. What single governance change would most reduce a repeat, and what would it cost?
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The change: move from a quarterly steering committee to a monthly 30-minute sponsor check-in focused only on decisions, risks and resource conflicts, combined with resource commitments written into the charter before start.
Reasoning: the failure was not that the risk was unknown - it was recorded in the register and raised in three reports - but that there was no forum with decision rights between reports. Reporting without a decision point converts risk into news. Monthly cadence matches the pace of a 14-week project; quarterly governance has a decision latency longer than the project's remaining life.
Cost and trade-off: roughly 6 hours of sponsor time over the remaining run and an hour of preparation each cycle. That is cheap relative to a missed regulatory date, but it is not free - the sponsor must genuinely decide, or the meeting becomes another status report.
Secondary change: clarify the coordinator versus project manager distinction at portfolio level so charters are not written with delivery accountability and no authority. If neither the charter nor the cadence changes, expect the same conflict in the next release.