Resignation

In November '07, I was in a difficult position :

• My authority as a project manager had been usurped by a contract programme manager who was effectively doing my job as well as his own.
• I had little or no control over the (remote) suppliers I relied on, and was therefore ineffective.
• I had no further work scheduled
• A(nother) restructure had split the responsibilities of line management and project management in such a way that project managers like me had no control over the people who were assigned to their project. This, in my view, contravenes the number one rule of management - it's all about the people!
  

My position was untenable and I did the only thing I could. I resigned.

Of course, I got another job first. I had kept in touch with R, who had worked on Condor with me. He had moved to another company and by all accounts was loving it. So, when I felt I needed a change, I contacted him again and asked if his company had a vacancy. They did!

Before I go into details of my new job, though, I would like to comment on leaving the old one.

My terms of employment specified that either side needed to give 12 weeks notice. At the time I signed it in November '05, I wasn't planning to leave any time soon, and it was not something I thought I could argue about at the time. So I signed.

Now, two years later, I couldn't wait to leave, and had no inclination to wait around for 3 months doing nothing before I could start my new job. But having done a little research at my favourite resource on the subject of management, I went and spoke to my bosses boss, Gavin. It was he who had initially interviewed me, and if anybody had the final say on my leaving it would be him. Once I got confirmation from my new boss that I had got the job, I made an appointment to see Gavin one-to-one.
"I'm resigning!" I said as an opener. Beating around the bush is not his style, nor mine. He paused for a second, expressionless, then asked:
"What are the drivers?"
I explained that I had no control over what I was doing, that someone else was doing my job and that I could only get the opportunities I wanted elsewhere. He challenged me on that, but I wasn't there for an argument. I refused to say where I was going, and said I was here to "negotiate my exit date".

I argued that:

1. My project was due to go live within a week
2. I had no other work allocated to me, so would not have to hand anything over
   

And then I asked to leave in three weeks.

To my amazement, he agreed. With some proviso's. All he insisted on was that the project was implemented successfully as scheduled, and that warranty support was in place and working. Which was achieved.

I didn't quite manage to follow Mark's advice to "tell no-one", but I did make appointments with some people I wanted to stay in touch with and told them face-to-face. And I still have them as valuable contacts.

So, if you are in the same position as me, here's my advice -

1. Listen to the M-T series of podcasts on the subject
2. Find another job
3. Once you get it, resign face-to-face with your boss and negotiate the date you leave
4. Ensure that you tie up all loose ends - don't burn bridges
5. Be professional.
   

Good Luck.

In my next post, more about my new job.

Lessons learned

I learned a couple of valuable lessons from project Condor and my time at my last company:

It's not enough to sit back and do just enough to get by. You need to exercise your authority, take charge of the situation and generate confidence in other people's minds (your team's, your peer's and your bosses') that you are fully in control.
I need to have a team around me to be fully effective. My last project involved a third-party supplier up North, a business team in the West Country, and an Infrastructure team in London and Edinburgh (more about this another time, perhaps). I never felt fully in control of the project in that there was nothing I could do when things went wrong.

From now, though, things will be different. Very different!

Resigned

It has been a long time since my last post. I have little in the way of excuses, but here goes anyway -

After my last post, my responsibilities on project Condor, as I called it, were halved when another PM was assigned to help. I didn't take that very well. On top of the fact that I was going through some personal issues at the time, it made me feel very low indeed. The other PM took on more and more of the management responsibilities, and I let him. My motivation was at an all-time low. The project went live in September and I was not invited to the launch party.

Back in late June, though, I was asked to pick up another project because the incumbent had resigned. Initially, I was sceptical. They're giving me some unimportant little project that no-one else wants to get me something to do, I thought. But I was wrong. It was a large project, and a fairly important one. But if anyone else had refused it, they had more sense than me. I took it on, and steered it (sort of) into Production. Once again, though, it was believed I needed 'help' so a dedicated programme manager was assigned to 'help'. Of course, with nothing else to do, he took over and I had little to do.

So I waited until the project was nearly live, and then I resigned. That was in November.

In my next post, I will talk about resignations, in the follow-up I will talk about my new job, which is soooo much better!