In honor of Halloween week, I’ve been scaring the living daylights out of myself with a monstrous marathon of horror movies! 🎃👻🍿Well, no. I lied. Horror movies don’t scare me anymore. They did when I was younger. I don’t know what happened. Did I grow up and become jaded and cynical? Or is it that after years of being a project manager, I have seen enough ghosts, monsters, and haunted houses that Nosferatu himself would only scare me if it came along with a surprise budget cut, a lead engineer suddenly leaving the team, and a hard deadline breathing on my neck?

Yeah, Project Management is certainly scary as hell. I would actually say that each project is like a haunted house: maybe daunting, sometimes cold and bleak, certainly packed with unexpected twists and hidden challenges, and most of all, always ready to produce a ghost that goes Boo! when you least expect it.

The Haunted House of Project Management

We all have our ghosts and monsters, things that terrify us. A missed deadline, a fuming stakeholder, a production-killer bug. Each of you, dear, beautiful readers, surely have your own list. We have encountered those ghosts before. They are our ghosts from the past, and we know what they do to us, so we are terrified they will reappear. As they are ghosts from the past, we may already know how to fight them. Sometimes, though, ghosts from the past reemerge adopting new forms, so those little bad boys keep surprising us. The bad project manager gets killed and becomes a skeleton as a cautionary tale for the next ghost hunter. The good project manager gets scarred, learns a new trick, and leaves the haunted house triumphant. Well, maybe just alive and in need of some PTO, actually.

Alrighty then! Are you ready for some seriously hair-raising monsters?

The Energy-sucking Vampire

Vampires are those tasks, or maybe meetings, or even people, that drain our energy, that suck the life force out of us. Think about it. Vampires (especially “modern” ones) are often super handsome. They look so appetizing! We are drawn to them. We think they want to kiss us, but what they really do is suck our blood, zap our vitality. At work, if there’s a meeting, task, or process that depletes our energy, wastes our time, and doesn’t produce valuable outcomes, let’s fight it as if it were a vampire.

Oh, btw, do you know what is the biggest fear of the vampire project manager?

Stake-holders!

Did I go too far? Please don’t kill me! Let’s move on 😁

The Stupid Zombie

I hate zombies. I find them dumb and boring. They only exist to growl and barely walk, but somehow, they manage to get to other humans, eat their brains, and turn them into dull, stupid zombies. At work, zombies are those who act without thinking, follow others without questioning, and just want to convert you to their lazy cult. Work-zombies are dangerous. A good project manager avoids them like the plague. An outstanding leader knows how to un-zombie them.

The Possessed

The possessed is a project that goes south and needs an exorcism to expel the devil out of it. If you are a project manager performing an exorcism, I mean, trying to fix a project gone wrong, you may want to apply some learnings from our favorite cinematic exorcists: plan and prepare in advance, don’t attempt to do it by yourself, always bring help, be ready to get dirty and to see and hear pretty nasty things, don’t take it personally, and be firm but also super sensitive, you may end up killing the possessed, I mean, the project.

The Werewolf, the Mummy, and the Psycho Killer that never dies

The werewolf is a perfectly pleasant co-worker who turns into a nasty individual. Werewolfs lose their humanity, their body and spirit bend and break, and they become animals. While a full moon triggers a werewolf, maybe a missed deadline, a failed feature, or a bad bug is what triggers someone else. Oh well. Don’t trigger a werewolf. Avoid becoming a werewolf yourself.

The Mummy is the creature that goes berserk when their eternal resting is disturbed. I’ll only say this here: sometimes if something is not broken, it is better not to try to fix it. Don’t try to be a hero. Pick your fights. Don’t wake up the mummy.

The Psycho Killer that never dies (like the guy from the Halloween movies) is that tricky problem that we thought we fixed but keeps appearing. What we need to do here is to kill it at the root, so this is where good all Root Cause Analysis (RCA) comes in handy.

How to kill a monster

To kill a monster, we need to face it. Do you know that character in some haunted-house movies who has been living/working on the premises for a while and insists on denying the place is infested with ghosts? Yeah, that is the team member who pretends everything is fine, either ignoring the project has problems or, worse, hiding the problems under the rug. No problem ever goes away by being ignored. No monster gets killed if we hide below a blanket. Remember when I said that procrastination often happens when the task at hand is so scary that we run away from it? Exactly, monsters don’t disappear by closing our eyes. They disappear when we face them, but at the same time, facing monsters is scary AF. Don’t worry, I know what to do next.

To kill a monster, we must take it out of the dark and bring it into the light. Monsters thrive in obscurity, where we can’t see and we are alone and afraid. Vampires die under the sunlight, werewolves exist under a full moon, and only bland ghosts show up in the middle of the day. To solve a problem, we often need to air it, talk about it, escalate it, and involve anyone we think could help. We need to be extra transparent and communicative. We need to shed light on it so that folks clearly see it and help us.

So, what do you say? Ready to kill some monsters?

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