Or maybe it was something else; maybe something you forgot to do, some budget report you forgot to submit, some paperwork to keep the bureaucrats and bean-counters from making your team even more miserable than they already are. Whatever it is, it’s going to cost your project some precious resources, or add to the bureaucratic burden, or somehow put the project at much greater risk of delay or outright failure.

That being the case, wouldn’t it be great if you could find a quiet confessional booth somewhere, and whisper to a kind old priest inside the booth, “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned…”?

The problem faced by many of today’s IT managers is that they know they’ve made a mistake — but (a) it’s not obvious to them how they can undo, work-around, or rectify that mistake, and (b) there’s nobody they can talk to. For whatever reason, they feel that they can’t talk to their subordinates (after all, they’re the boss!), and they can’t talk to their fellow-manager peers … and most of all, they dare not confess their mistake to their boss. Why not? Because their boss would have a hysterical fit, or fire the errant project-manager on the spot; and his/her peers would sharpen their knives, and begin figuring out how to take advantage of the mistake when it comes time to award promotions, raises, and bonuses.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s like this for all companies; there must be a friendly, supportive IT organization out there somewhere. And it’s not an “all-or-nothing” situation: if you’ve made a mistake but know how to fix it, you can sometimes enlist the cooperation of your subordinates (“we’re in this together, guys, and I’ll really owe you one if you help me out). Indeed, you might be able to make an apologetic confession to your boss, if the mistake isn’t too expensive to fix …

But there are an awful lot of situations where that won’t work… and this series of blog postings is about the formal creation of an “IT Project Confessional” to provide a neutral, objective, confidential, no-risk (well, probably low-risk) mechanism for project managers to seek advice and guidance so they can recover from their mistakes and ultimately succeed with their projects.

As you can imagine, things are a little more difficult in the “real world” of an IT organization than they are in the priest’s confessional booth: you can’t just tell the sinner, “Repent, say three ‘hail Mary’s,’ vow to never commit such a sin again, and you will be forgiven.” Here are some of the topics I’ll be covering in the days ahead:

• Finding sinners – how do you get people to admit they might need help?
• Protecting the confidentiality of project managers discussing their mistakes
• Ethics: what if the project manager has violated a law or government regulation?
• Types of advice – should you tell the sinner to quit, work harder, confess publicly, or something else?
• Categories of project management sins: venal sins and cardinal sins
• Resisting pressure from higher-level executives who say to the confessional priest, “Off the record, no names mentioned, tell me what’s going on…”
• Forgiveness — is it possible? Practical?
• Anticipating a sin – what to do if the project manager says, “I haven’t sinned yet, but I know I’m about to…”
• Measuring results
• Providing follow-up references and resources for ongoing help
• Setting up a “Sinners Anonymous” for project managers who want to network and share their experiences with other sinners

Stay tuned … and if you know any project-management sinners out there, tell them to take a look, and offer their own ideas, experiences, and opinions…

I’m here in Rome this week, presenting a two-day seminar on  “Managing Death-March Projects” for Technology Transfer Institute. You should be there so you can hear whatever clever jokes may occur to me while I’m presenting my material, as well as the comments and questions from the other participants. But if you’re stuck in some other part of the world, or you couldn’t persuade your boss to send you to Rome, you can click here to download the (17MB) PDF version of the presentation, which has a whole  bunch of embedded links to other presentations, publications, books, articles, websites, etc.

Here’s the presentation: