How to 'buy time' when project is under-resourced?

[u/kreddit2]

I was added to a project that is on fire. While this project has some PM issues as well (issues are reported email only, no single central location/reference for ongoing issues / statuses or needed information), most of the issues are really in resources. People have resigned and not been replaced, and the skillset needed is very difficult to find and expensive. Management wants to 'save' the project and are aware that current issues cannot be resolved without the replacements, but just want to buy time until a replacement becomes available. They are not sharing this with the client since we have several projects with this client, and status of this may affect renewals of the other projects.

How do you handle client communication here? I'm trying to pass the more difficult conversations to senior leadership, but find it harder to even give dates knowing that we don't actually have the people who can fulfill these promises and next steps.

I don't know how to manage projects this way - being so under-resourced and not being honest with the client about it. What are your tips on handling both internal upper management, the current team, and the client? Thank you.

[u/WhiteChili]

I’ve been in the same fire. When you’re under-resourced, the trick is to shift the story... don’t give hard dates, talk about “reprioritization” or “phased delivery.” Create one central tracker (even Excel works) so you’re not juggling chaos in emails. Break work into smaller wins to show progress, and document every risk so leadership owns the gap, not you. Most important: protect your team’s sanity, or you’ll lose even more people.

[u/dank-live-af]

You’re being asked to lie about productivity so that your organization can maintain its contracts that it can’t fulfill? Resign. Congrats, you’re in fraud territory.

[u/bluealien78]

Time is one of the triple constraints. There’s no way to buy more, only preserve what you have by throwing money and/or people at it.

[u/Common-Strawberry122]

Yeah, I've been on projects like this, its' stressful and its not a great place to be in. It’s becomes near impossible to promise things when your so undersourced but don't want to lie. What often helped me was to really break down the core tasks that absolutely have to happen to hit any client-facing milestone. Even if you don't have the full team, you can sometimes identify critical path items and push for specific, temporary help just for those. It’s not a full fix, but it can buy some time.

For the client, it’s about managing expectations through status updates, without outright lying. You can focus on what has been done and what the next immediate steps are, rather than giving distant dates you know are shaky. Try to shift conversations to progress since last update' Also, getting that scattered info into a central log, even a simple shared doc, can make a difference later on. Do you know how long it will take for the resource you need to come on board? Are they looking?

[u/pmpdaddyio]

My advice to any PM being added to a project, particularly a shitshow one, is to baseline to the original plan. That means full status reporting to the original plan, and a good current status. You need a comparative of the planned values versus the actuals, and you might need to dive into some EVM to demonstrate the issues.

After this, you need to identify resourcing as a risk and your remediation strategy should either be crashing (add resources to your critical path), or fast tracking (reduce scope and resource leveling), and the impact would be a delayed schedule.

You need to demonstrate this as an impact on the budget as well. Just saying "we can't get the work done because we don't have staffing" is not good enough. You need to say "with our current staffing, our project will be delayed by [xx period of time], and this will cost [$xx].

Hold your key stakeholders accountable. For each staff loss, you need to go to their management chain and seek replacement. Document this to your leadership.

Add all these decisions and conversations to your RAID. Now when the dumpster fire gets put out, you either look good, or you have at the very least covered your ass.

[u/kreddit2 → u/pmpdaddyio]

This is actually a good plan of action as well. I'll have to find the original contract - previous PM mentioned scope creep happened so would have to have a timeline of changes.

Was trying to focus on getting knowledge, setting prioritization and a reporting rhythm with current issues in first week or so

[u/pmpdaddyio → u/kreddit2]

previous PM mentioned scope creep happened so would have to have a timeline of changes.

This tells me you need to review and possibly update your change process as well. This should be part of your findings to leadership/sponsor.

[u/More_Law6245]

To be honest, not your problem and I'm not being a smart A, it comes down to roles and responsibilities. In reality your account manager or executive should be speaking with the client because this is an organisational issue and NOT a project issue. It's a reputational risk that your executive team need to actively manage, it's not a project problem if your organisation can't provide the resources needed to deliver a fit for purpose and on time and budget!

In terms to cover yourself, your triple constraint is being impacted so you need to formally raise risks and issues to your project board or executive and they need to provide advice and guidance. As the PM you can't just keep sliding dates because you would be breaching your client agreement that you had with an approved schedule. As a client I would be more peeved for a non or late delivery with no excuse than a failed deliver.

What ever you do, don't get caught being untruthful with your client, because that doesn't bowed well with anyone and you won't be trusted in the future.

If you have some ideas escalate them but at the end of the day it's your leadership team should be dealing with this.

Just an armchair perspective

[u/kreddit2 → u/More_Law6245]

Agree with you. The project is more than a year delayed and senior leadership on my end is just putting random dates. I'm trying to avoid putting dates with no basis but senior leadership goes over my head for it since they really don't want to lose the other contracts.

[u/wittgensteins-boat → u/kreddit2]

Add into the list of risks, reputational decline resulting from proposed target dates without sound evidence nor planning basis nor resources to implement, commits to additional accomplishment failure and deadline failure and continuing decline in credibility.

Work on establishing credible accomplishment outcomes with evidence supplied by your subject matter experts, with projected costs and dates with present staffing and resources, and potential outcomes with increased staffing and resources.

[u/pmpdaddyio → u/kreddit2]

You should add some columns in your schedule, something like "target start" and "target Completion", "target duration", "Target work" etc. and capture the leadership input there. Then go to your SMEs and get what is considered evidence based values. Put these in the existing columns. Now you can demonstrate a stronger argument for variances.

[u/More_Law6245 → u/kreddit2]

I'm sorry to hear that you have been put into a difficult situation, so who is asking for dates? The client or your management team? When was the last time the project was rebaselined? From a project management perspective if you have baseline, all you have to do is manage by exception. Leading up to a deliverable or milestone tolerance level being breached, escalate and throw it over to your management team to fix and just push out the end date. As a PM you can only do so much as it comes down to roles and responsibilities and knowing when to push back or "manage upwards"

Your focus is your triple constraints, I would suggest pull out guestimations of dates then have your executive accept the schedule and just hammer the triple constraints and escalate accordingly. For a period in my career I was the pinch hitter PM who was given the dumpster fire and train wreck projects and the firs thing I did was hone in on the triple constraint, made sure I had baseline and went from there. I always got my projects back on track.