What do you do when it feels like everyone is sabotaging your project to fail? How am I supposed to handle it?

The following assumes that the project is in its late stages. First, to every bad situation at work there is usually a way to excel.

In this situation, the upside is that you can demonstrate your ability to evaluate risk. Whereas developers and team leads generally think in terms of technical goals and purism, a manager is usually looking at the project in terms of:

1. Visibility – if this succeeds/fails how does it affect me?
2. Money – does the project achieve enough bang for the buck and on time?
3. Risks – what causes or could cause the project to fail completely or be delivered late
4. Dependencies – similar to #3, dependencies gets more specific in detailing the external factors that create the risks.

The only thing you can do at this point is document the risks and shortcomings so far in a positive way. As an example of what to avoid, without naming names. Never name someone in a document like that… write it up, objectively, stating the missed points and dependencies without saying who is personally responsible.

Make sure that if you point out something that’s wrong, it must be followed up with a mitigation. Risk/Mitigation always go together. Whatever you do, do not expose anyone in a document because in doing so, it will seem likely that given the right situation you could expose that manager next time.

If done right, it will appear as if you have the potential to manage projects or be an effective team lead.

On the other hand, you could just look for another job. It all depends on how much confidence you have in individuals as managers… whether they have vision and integrity or not and what your personal job satisfaction is when factoring out certain problems or problem individuals. If you’re ready to leave but would rather not, do the following:

1. Get job interest elsewhere, never negotiate without a fallback (anonymous resumes only, dice is good these days)
2. State in your conversation that you do not want to leave, but there are some issues causing some serious lack of job enjoyment that you believe can be worked around or resolved. See what they think
3. Stay with an internal move or leave.

As long as you’ve covered your bases, you will eventually come out on top. It will just come down to a choice of which position you like more.

Advertisement