Story of the determined Project Manager

Abhay was super excited to be appointed as Project Manager of a new cloud migration project. He wanted to get it started quickly and have a flawless project delivery. But his happiness didn’t last too long, and he started facing the ground reality soon.

“Abhay, how can you ask for resources when the SOW is not yet signed?”, said Minal from Resource Management team. “And even if you had one, we don’t have people with those skills available”. Abhay asked, “But paperwork will take long time, is there any way I can start the project in parallel?”. “Well, we don’t recommend that, but if you get approval from legal team then you can start recruiting the external candidates”. Abhay got ok from legal team after lot of emails, but then he had to work with the recruitment team for external hires and the long joining process was not aligning with project’s timelines. He got very demotivated and reached out to his boss. Vikram, his boss said, “Don’t lose heart Abhay. Challenges are part and parcel of every project manager’s life but through strong persistence, he/she can certainly overcome those; like that sparrow who won the war with the sea”. Abhay requested Vikram curiously to tell the Panchatantra story of the sparrow and the sea and Vikram started narrating it.

Once upon a time, a pair of sparrows lived close to the Sea. One day the female bird laid its eggs near the ocean and went out in search of food. In her absence, the Sea sent a wave that sucked the eggs into the waters. The female returned to the nest but could not find the eggs and came to know that sea has swallowed it. She begged / requested sea to return the eggs with folded wings and tears but that did not make any impact on the arrogant sea. Then her husband said, “Wait and see what I will do now. We will drain all the water from the Sea and leave him dry”. The female said, “How is that possible? Our beak is just as big as a drop of the sea. How can we consume all the water in the Sea?”. “He who has courage is the stronger person. Let’s siphon off all the water in the Sea and make him dry,” said the male and the couple started their task. Looking at the pair’s determination, their friends, the cranes, the peacocks, the cuckoos and other birds joined the team. The news reached Garuda, Lord Vishnu's vehicle and both warned the sea to turn it into a desert. Frightened, the Sea returned the eggs to the sparrows.

Abhay was super charged with this story and decided to fire all the cylinders. He offered the best suitable external candidates and, in parallel, got the work started with available internal team members. Many hurdles kept coming his way, like timely approvals, availability of environment, dependencies on other teams and technical issues in migration and many more. But determined like the sparrows, he kept dealing with each one of those persistently and the result i.e. the successful project was an obvious result.

Friends, do you any such project stories of swallowing the sea? How did your project bring the eggs back? What is the moral of this story for you?

PMTantra?- Wisdom through Stories!