Three Voices, No Decision

The failure is accountability, not effort. The principle of defined roles and responsibilities requires every role to have clear accountabilities and the authority to discharge them. Here:

• The senior user is absent, so nobody is owning user requirements and benefits. Decisions drift down to operational staff who have interest but no delegated authority.
• The operations manager and supplier analyst are deciding without a decision right - which is why decisions are reversed when they collide with someone else's view.
• The senior supplier/IT operations conflict is a resourcing and delivery-approach question, which is board business, not project-manager business.
• The team manager has no clear escalation route, a communication failure as much as a role failure.

Why firefighting is corrosive: every decision the project manager takes on the users' behalf transfers the accountability to her. The senior user's ownership of requirements is eroded further, the board's highlight reports look green, and the underlying gap stays invisible until acceptance testing. She is also becoming the single point of failure and the bottleneck - 60% of her time is spent on work that belongs to the board.

Project manager's own actions:

• Build and circulate a short decision-rights map for process design: which decisions sit with the senior user, which with the team manager, which are changes requiring the change authority within set tolerances.
• Update the communication management approach (who needs what information, when, in what form) and issue a two-page highlight report flagging the decision log and the reversal pattern as a risk to acceptance.
• Agree with the senior supplier and IT operations manager a single written options paper on hosting, so the disagreement becomes a decision with facts attached rather than a dispute.
• Maintain the issues register, quantifying the rework cost of reversed decisions.

Not hers to take:

• She cannot appoint a deputy for the senior user or redefine that accountability - she can only recommend that the senior user nominates a delegate with recorded authority.
• She cannot settle the hosting dispute if it affects the project approach beyond her tolerance; that is board direction.
• She cannot remove the senior user.

Escalate: if the rework threatens stage tolerance, issue an exception report asking the board to require a named, delegated user representative. Frame it as a decision the board must make, with a recommendation - not a complaint.

It would resolve the symptom and entrench the cause. A design forum is a reasonable delivery mechanism - it gives the team manager a place to take questions and speeds up low-level decisions. It is not a substitute for user accountability.

• Decisions the project manager settles carry no user ownership. Users will dispute them at acceptance, which is exactly the reversal cycle already running.
• It moves decisions outside the change control route, so changes to baselined products would be made without assessment of impact on the business case, plans or risk.
• It hides the assurance gap from the board: the highlight reports would show progress while the acceptance risk compounds.

Acceptable version: the project manager chairs a forum that has explicit terms of reference - it can decide within defined tolerances (e.g. design detail with no cost, time or benefit impact) and must refer anything beyond that to the senior user or the change authority. The senior user or a named delegate must attend, and decisions must be logged. That preserves speed while keeping accountability where PRINCE2 puts it.