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It's not about not understanding the projects, it's more often about misaligned incentives. In most companies project work is the exception compared to "everyda

It's not about not understanding the projects, it's more often about misaligned incentives. In most companies project work is the exception compared to "everyday functioning" of the company, and the line managers are managing that instead; and a typical situation is where particular resources are needed for the success of the project, but they're also needed for the non-project things that the particular manager controlling that resource cares about and is evaluated upon, so it's in their best interest to prioritize other things at the expense of that project. Or that manager might need a particular narrow subsection of that project done their way and the rest of the project is worthless to their goals (i.e. the very common 'silo thinking' in many organizations), so they might assign resources for that part of the project and 'starve' it afterwards. Management and internal politics has a big effect on which things get done and which don't.

loopz 6y ago
Traditional line managers lack interest / incentives for projects. Even though they might be high priority, different functions have different goals and measurements. The managers themselves fail every new line initiative, since they've no project / PM experience too, and also no support or real budgets. When this happens, look at the environment though for answers. This type of managing is running out of time, as it simply doesn't work that well beyond managers having eachother's backs. Managers need to involve themselves much more around projects / Agile, than just borrowing and stealing back "resources". If they can't provide servant leadership skills and healthy repurposing of roles, they need to stay away and clear blocks, allocate funds and people, from quite a distance.