The Reassigned Commissioning Engineer
You are the project manager for a $14.2M wastewater treatment plant upgrade for a municipal owner-operator. The project is 18 months long and currently in month 11. Your organization is a weak matrix: the charter says you will "coordinate" resources, while functional managers retain assignment authority. The electrical commissioning work sits on the critical path and depends on one senior electrical engineer, Priya, from the operations group. Priya's resource calendar shows a 60% allocation to your project, but her timesheets show closer to 20% for the last six weeks. Last Friday, the operations functional manager reassigned Priya to an unplanned plant outage for an indefinite period, telling you, "It's a regulatory emergency-you'll have to work around it." Your sponsor is the VP of Operations, who is also the functional manager's boss. The electrical commissioning package is now forecast to slip three weeks, and there is no qualified backup. The steering committee meets in ten days.
1. Diagnose the organizational context and explain why this is not simply a scheduling problem. What authority do you actually have, and what should you do first?
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The governing structure is a weak matrix, and the charter language confirms it: you coordinate but do not assign. Priya's functional manager controls her availability, so issuing a schedule directive or demanding that she report to you would exceed your legitimate authority and likely harden resistance. This is an organizational-context problem first and a schedule problem second.
Your first move should be to quantify the impact, not escalate emotionally. Build a short decision brief: Priya's required commissioning tasks, the three-week critical-path exposure, the regulatory and contractual consequences, and the specific alternative options (delay commissioning, hire a contract commissioning engineer, resequence work, or accept a later milestone). Send it to the functional manager and sponsor before the steering committee, asking for a priority decision between the outage and the project. Because the sponsor is the functional manager's boss, the sponsor is the correct escalation path for a cross-functional resource conflict-but go through the functional manager first so you are not seen as bypassing line authority. In parallel, protect the schedule with a contingency: obtain quotes for a contract commissioning engineer and check whether any acceptance testing can be decoupled. Longer term, propose a resource governance agreement that gives the project a documented priority rule and named backup for critical roles.
2. The functional manager offers Priya at 30% for two weeks, then full-time. Should you accept? What conditions and documentation would you require?
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Treat the offer as a partial mitigation, not a solution. Thirty percent for two weeks may keep design reviews moving, but commissioning is hands-on and often requires contiguous access to the equipment and the client's operations team. Before accepting, test the offer against the critical path: which specific commissioning activities can be completed at 30%, and what is the expected finish date if the remaining work starts two weeks later? If the answer still produces a three-week slip, the offer does not solve the problem.
If you accept, convert it into a written commitment rather than a verbal understanding. Document the named individual, the exact allocation percentage, the start and end dates, the deliverables expected, and the consequence if the commitment is broken. Update the resource calendar and the RACI for commissioning. Ask the functional manager to confirm the arrangement by email and copy the sponsor so the priority decision is visible. Also ask what happens if the outage extends: name a backup or authorize the contract engineer now. Do not accept an open-ended "we'll revisit" without a trigger date and an explicit fallback. Finally, track Priya's actual hours weekly; a second variance should trigger escalation immediately, not after another six weeks.