The Programme Manager Who Delivers but Cannot Engage
You are the competence lead in the PMO of a transmission system operator. Programme 'Grid South' is worth €120m over three years, comprises seven projects and about 60 people, and is currently six weeks behind on permitting. The programme manager, Marek, has personally delivered four complex capital projects on schedule and is technically respected by the regulator. His 360 feedback is poor: stakeholders report being informed late or not at all; two project managers resigned in the last year citing micromanagement; in a recent regulatory hearing he answered technical questions well but conceded commitment dates without checking with the commercial team. The sponsoring director wants him replaced and has asked you for a recommendation. The next regulatory milestone is in six months, and there is no obvious internal successor.
1. Design the competence assessment you would run before advising on replacement. What evidence would you gather, and against what framework?
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The assessment must separate three things that are currently being tangled together: what Marek cannot do, what he does not prioritise, and what he does badly because the role is under-supported.
Framework: the IPMA ICB competence areas give a structure that is defensible to an HR director - Perspective (strategy, governance, power and interest, culture), People (communication, relationships and engagement, leadership, conflict, self-reflection), and Practice (stakeholders, plan and control, organisation and information, risk). Rate each on observed evidence, not personality adjectives.
Evidence, deliberately multi-source:
- Two observed steering committee sessions, coded for who speaks, what is decided, and what is left ambiguous.
- Stakeholder interviews from three groups that disagree - regulator, internal commercial, and the contractor - because a single-source 360 can encode one group's grievance.
- Decision archaeology: minutes and email for the last 20 commitment dates, to test whether the hearing failure was an isolated lapse or a pattern of unlogged commitments.
- Structured self-assessment with Marek against the same framework, so the conversation starts from his view.
- Exit-interview data from the two departing project managers, plus a check of whether delegation was formally available to him.
Be explicit about the criterion. Replacement should hinge on whether the gaps are in competences that can be developed within six months at acceptable risk - not on whether he is likeable. Communication and stakeholder engagement respond to coaching; a chronic unwillingness to be challenged does not.
2. Replace or develop? Recommend one, with the conditions that would change your answer.
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Recommendation: develop, with a bounded, evidence-gated plan and a named deputy - not replacement now.
The reasoning is about risk asymmetry. Replacing a programme manager six months before a regulatory milestone introduces a knowledge-transfer gap, a regulator relationship reset, and a search market where a €120m transmission programme will take four to six months to fill. His technical credibility with the regulator is a real asset that no successor will have on day one.
Conditions that make the recommendation work:
- A formal deputy or delivery lead takes operational control of the seven projects, so Marek's micromanagement has a structural remedy rather than a behavioural promise.
- A decision-rights protocol: no commitment to the regulator or contractor without commercial sign-off. This addresses the hearing failure directly, and incidentally makes it a governance fix rather than a personality indictment.
- A 90-day behavioural contract with three observable indicators - stakeholder comms sent before, not after, decisions; delegation evidenced in project meeting attendance; commitments logged.
- A scheduled review gate at the end of month four, before the milestone becomes unrecoverable.
What would change the answer: refusal to accept the decision-rights protocol; a second unlogged commitment; or evidence that the departures were caused by behaviour no structural fix can contain. Any of those converts it to an exit with a managed handover.
Presenting it as 'develop with a gate' also gives the sponsoring director something achievable, which a bare defence of Marek would not.
3. What should the PMO itself do differently, as opposed to what Marek must do?
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The PMO risks treating this as an individual remediation when it is also a service-design failure. Three of the symptoms point at the PMO:
1. Stakeholder engagement was never staffed. If the programme's external engagement depended entirely on one person's instinct, the PMO had no engagement plan, no stakeholder map for the regulator and commercial team, and no calendar of commitments. Build one, and assign ownership that does not sit with Marek alone.
2. Micromanagement often signals missing information. Two project managers resigned; before concluding this is a character flaw, check whether the PMO gave them anything better than a status template. A decision log, a clear escalation threshold, and a fortnightly exceptions review give a controlling manager less reason to intervene.
3. The commitment-control gap is a governance gap. A commitment register with commercial sign-off should have caught the hearing problem before the regulator did. That is a PMO product, not a personal discipline.
4. Protect the assessment's credibility. Do not let the coaching plan become invisible; publish the developmental objectives and the review gate to the sponsor, so that 'we are supporting Marek' cannot later be read as 'the PMO protected him'.
Finally, treat the two departures as a retention signal across the portfolio - check whether other programmes show the same pattern before the next resignation.