Martin Arrived With the Right Model

I met Martin in coaching at a point of maximum frustration.

His new CEO had referred him to coaching after several difficult months as Project Director. At 37, Martin already had 5 years of project management experience in complex projects, a PMP certification, and the confidence of someone who had learned and practised project management in a structured environment, where governance, reviews, risks, and escalation routines meant something.

His disappointment was intense. “They hired me to organise the way projects are managed, he said, and now they are stopping me from doing exactly that. Even the CEO is putting the brakes on. I do not feel supported by anyone,” he told me in our first session.

From his perspective, the contradiction was obvious. The company had asked him to implement a proper project management system. He saw the gaps immediately: no consistent stage-gate discipline, no reliable risk management, no common project language, no structured escalation rhythm, and no real cost visibility across projects.

Three months into the assignment, Martin began to feel the organisation pushing back. Functional managers questioned the templates. Senior engineers saw the new process as administrative work added on top of real delivery. Commercial teams resisted earlier commitment on scope because it made their promises to clients more visible. Operations argued that project reviews were slowing down execution. And somewhere in the middle of all this, project managers and finance seemed to have become adversaries rather than partners in understanding project reality. 

Martin's conclusion sounded reasonable: nobody here really knows how to manage projects.

The Company Was Not Starting From Zero

That sentence needed to be examined carefully.

If nobody knew how to manage projects, how had the company delivered them for more than twenty-five years? How had customers stayed? How had revenue grown? How had technical problems been solved, installations completed, penalties avoided, and urgent recoveries made possible?

The answer was not immediately clear. When I asked the question, Martin paused. For a few seconds, the frustration lost some of its certainty. The company had been delivering projects for almost a quarter of a century: imperfectly, expensively, inconsistently - yes, but not randomly.

That pause made Martin see things in a different light. It opened a different conversation.

The company did know how to execute. It knew how to solve technical problems under pressure. It knew which engineer to call when a customer escalated. It knew how to move resources informally when a delivery became critical. It knew how to recover late-stage failures through personal commitment, technical intelligence, and a strong sense of responsibility.

What it did not know was how to see the project early enough as a managerial object.

The organisation was competent in technical execution and weak in project visibility. Its knowledge lived in people, shortcuts, informal agreements, historical memory, and conversations that never became management data. The system was expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale, yet it was still a system.

Best Practice Without Field Reading

Martin had been fortunate to grow quickly in an environment where good project management practice was already structured, legitimate, and supported. He knew what good looked like because he had seen it working. That experience gave him standards, discipline, and professional confidence. His PMP gave him pride.

It also made the current organisation look emptier and lacking more capability than it was.

Where Martin saw absence, there was often an informal operating logic. Where he saw immaturity, there was sometimes a survival mechanism. Where he saw resistance, there was also information about power, speed, habits, fear, and the way decisions were really made.

A management model enters an organisation with a promise of order. It gives names to things that are vague or tacit. It creates stages, roles, gates, documents, responsibilities, and review moments. For a leader who has seen the cost of poor governance, the model can feel like clarity.

The risk begins when the model becomes the first language of diagnosis.

Before a model is implemented, the organisation has to be read with enough discipline and openness to understand how work actually moves, where authority sits, which decisions are avoided, which informal agreements protect speed, and where the current system produces both performance and loss.

Without that reading, best practice becomes blind practice. The leader sees deviations from the model more clearly than the operating logic of the business. Resistance is interpreted as a lack of maturity,  knowledge or even ill will. Pushback is treated as a lack of discipline. Informal practices are dismissed too early, before their function is understood.

When the Model Starts Using You (the Manager)

A project review template may be correct and still arrive in the wrong place. A stage-gate process may be necessary, but it still ignores how commercial commitments are really made. A risk register may be professionally designed and still fail because nobody has clarified who is allowed to change priorities when risk becomes real.

The model may describe what good project management should look like. It does not automatically reveal what the organisation is currently using to survive, deliver, and protect itself, and lose money at the same time.

Martin's authority began to depend on the correctness of the model. When people questioned the system, he defended project management as a discipline. When managers resisted documentation, he explained why governance mattered. When engineers complained about bureaucracy, he insisted that mature organisations work with structure.

Much of what he said was technically true. Yet the more he defended the model, the less he examined what the resistance was telling him.

Some resistance was avoidance. Some was political. Some was laziness disguised as pragmatism. But a lot of it carried important information. The proposed governance rhythm did not match decision speed. The reporting structure did not match where influence actually lived. The templates required data that teams could not yet produce reliably. The escalation process assumed sponsorship that the CEO had not yet made explicit.

Martin was trying to implement project management while several executive decisions remained unnamed.

Who had the authority to stop a project when the scope became commercially unsafe? 

Who could overrule a functional manager protecting resources? 

Who owned the margin deterioration before finance reported it? 

Who would sponsor the PMO when project discipline created conflict with powerful people?

A model cannot answer these questions on behalf of leadership. It can only expose them.

Judgment Comes Before Implementation

When the model starts using the leader, the leader becomes its representative instead of the organisation's interpreter. The conversation narrows to compliance, adoption, and resistance. The deeper managerial work remains untouched: translating the model into the specific authority, trade-offs, consequences, and sponsorship the business is prepared to sustain.

Management models are useful because they carry accumulated experience. They protect organisations from improvisation, heroic dependency, repeated mistakes, and the illusion that effort is the same as control. A company losing money through poor project visibility does not need admiration for its informal intelligence. It needs stronger managerial discipline.

Judgment comes before implementation. Seniority is not proved by applying a framework faithfully. It shows in the ability to understand what the framework is asking of this particular organisation, at this particular stage, with these power structures, these habits, these fears, these capabilities, and these economic pressures.

In Martin's case, what started as individual coaching for a newly appointed PMO Director could not remain individual for long. His frustration was real, but it was also diagnostic. It revealed that the PMO challenge was not limited to Martin's role. It was sitting in the leadership system.

The work expanded into team coaching with the CEO and the C-level team. Together, they looked at the organisational capability required for project management practices to become legitimate, usable, and integrated into the culture of the company.

That meant more than approving a PMO. The CEO had to sponsor consequences, not only endorse a system. Functional leaders had to accept that project discipline would limit some informal freedom. Commercial teams had to put in a significant effort to make clear the scope earlier. Finance had to enter the project conversation before losses were already visible.

The PMBOK guidelines helped. It gave structure, language, and tested practices. But the book could not replace the managerial judgment required to decide what to introduce, when to introduce it, what to simplify, what to enforce, what to postpone, and what conflict had to be made visible first.

A leader who uses a model well remains responsible for reality. A leader used by a model becomes responsible for correctness.

Where are you protecting the authority of a management model because engaging the reality of the business would require a more uncomfortable form of leadership?

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If you are a CEO, executive, or senior manager trying to implement a cross-organisational system that looks correct on paper but does not move in practice, this is rarely only an adoption problem. Bring the situation into a strategy conversation. We can look at what the model is asking from the organisation, what the organisation is already telling you, and what leadership work must become visible before implementation can become effective.

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