The work package that broke in week three
Stage 3 of a five-stage logistics replatform has ±£60k and ±3 weeks of tolerance, set by the board. The project manager issued a work package for the route-optimisation engine to an internal team manager: six weeks, £180k, covering products 3, 4 and 5. In week 3 the team manager found that the third-party routing library has been withdrawn by the vendor; a replacement adds £95k and five weeks. He continued building products 4 and 5 on the old library and mentioned the problem to the operations director, who emailed the executive asking why "the PM is slowing things down". The stage has four weeks left to run.
1. What should the team manager have done in week 3, and what authority does he have?
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The work package is an agreement, not a licence to adapt the plan. Within it the team manager may manage day-to-day work; he may not change products, quality criteria, cost or timescale.
What he should have done:
- Escalated immediately to the project manager as an issue - specifically an off-specification in effect, since the agreed approach cannot deliver products 3, 4 and 5 as described within the work package tolerance.
- Not continued products 4 and 5 on a library the vendor has withdrawn. Building dependent products on a known-dead component manufactures rework and destroys the value of the remaining stage.
The exception threshold matters: the variance is £95k against a stage tolerance of ±£60k, and five weeks against ±3 weeks. Both breach stage tolerance on their own, so this was never a decision the team manager - or the project manager - could absorb.
Mentioning it informally to the operations director is not escalation. It creates the false impression that the project manager is the obstacle when he has not yet been told the facts.
2. What must the project manager do on receiving the news, and how should he handle the operations director's email to the executive?
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On the issue itself:
- Record it in the issue register with the date the vendor withdrew the library - establishing when the team manager knew is part of the record.
- Assess impact across all six tolerances: cost, time, scope, quality (does the replacement library meet the quality criteria?), benefits and risk. The knock-on effect on dependent products 4 and 5 may exceed the £95k figure.
- Prepare an exception report to the board, because the forecast exceeds stage tolerance. The board decides: authorise an exception plan, change scope, stop the stage, or accept a revised position.
- Check project tolerances too, and whether the tolerance breach can still be contained within the stage's remaining four weeks.
- Do not let work continue unchecked - authorise the team manager explicitly on what to do with products 4 and 5 in the meantime.
On the email: the operations director is not part of the project organisation and cannot give direction on the project. The project manager should brief the executive before the board meeting with the sequence of events and dates, keep the response factual rather than defensive, and correct the impression that the PM is the bottleneck - the constraint is a withdrawn vendor library.
3. If the board authorises an exception plan, what happens next in process terms and what must be updated?
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An exception plan replaces the remainder of the current stage plan and is authorised by the board, not by the project manager.
Process sequence:
- The exception plan is produced (typically following the same product-based planning steps as a stage plan), showing how the stage will recover.
- The board authorises it - this is the directing-a-project decision to authorise a stage or exception plan.
- The stage boundary is then managed: produce an end-stage report covering what was actually delivered, the variance and the lessons, then a next-stage plan if the stage still ends where originally intended.
- Delivery resumes under controlling-a-stage, with a revised work package issued to the team manager for products 3 to 5.
What must be updated:
- Stage plan / exception plan, PID (tolerances, plan baseline), issue register (closure of the off-specification), risk register (single-source vendor dependency now realised), and the lessons log - including why the library's withdrawal was not identified as a supply risk during planning.