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During one of my projects, I was introduced to a control freak – my definition a person who claims to be GOD. This post is for people working on projects that have to work along side control freaks or who self proclaim themselves as GOD. As a person I like things to be black or white and hate gray because you can never know when to draw the line. Anyways sometimes I guess life does not operate in this way. On this specific client project which was a dead project my role was to be the new Project Manager. The last one had enough from the God to be. I was aware of this prior to signing up to lead this project. It was challenging and wanted to test my skills at delivering this specific project.

The team I was working with were smart, we were all from the same age group, except for God to be who belonged to the so called “Experienced Category” , we all had similar situations, and we got along pretty well. What was dysfunctional was the main guy within the development team he considered himself God and just did not give a damn of what others felt. Always made sure he took the glory even though he never did the hard parts of the project. It was pretty frustrating. The project was being dictated by the God to be of what gets done and when. For a few days I played along to understand this God psychology. Then one day as I usually do, I drew myself a matrix of the good guys and the bad. On this paper I plotted my strategic players and played a complete strategy game on this piece of paper as it would look pretty dumb if I switched on my computer to play Age of Mythology

I identified the control freak and decided that enough is enough. At the same time I needed to make sure the project would not be jeopardized due to this power trip. As a Project Manager I needed to be fair to the Business Analyst, to the developers, to the client, to my Boss and to the God to be.

I created a project plan though if many know me will say that project plans and me don’t go down very well. Anyways I tried following an agile project plan which included the functionality broken down in components, and went to one of the outstanding developers who was actually the main backbone doing all the work. I explained the objective of the meeting which was to assist the team to deliver this project. I asked him to assist me in planning delivery dates for each module so that I could advise the client. He is brilliant when it comes to coding. If he said it would take 3 days I added 20% more on top of that and allocated my dates. God to be was observing this and was fuming; I ignored this and went about completing my plan. Then invited the God to be and shared the plan and said “Your team is really brilliant, they have assisted in breaking this projects into various tasks and have given me reasonable dates. They did say that you have been extremely busy in making sure the project gets delivered.” The God to be was like” Yes am making sure we deliver from a development perspective, and since he felt he was still in control played along with the plan” This same plan was provided to the client who were fuming because till now they did not know what was going to happen to their project. Every day I would visit the development team and break the tasks down for each developer which included tasks for the God to be. God to be felt all the way he was in control, every developer was performing because it was important that the plan reflected that they has completed their task. The team followed the plan and the God to be had to deliver to what the plan said rather than calling random shots.

The morale of what I have tried to explain in this mini example is you need to identify the person who is playing God to be, nullify their power by aligning yourself with the actually workers gain their confidence, make them feel part of the project and see how the God to be becomes the Mule. As a Project Manager its important to be in control for the delivery of the project but its also your duty for your team to feel they are in power. All the best, if you have any feedback on alternative strategies that would be great.