How Project Managers Spot Red Flags and Get Ahead of Them

Project professionals know anticipating the need to pivot is a mainstay on any project. But what warning signs should you look out for? How can project managers identify them? And how should you inform the C-suite of major red flags? We discuss this with Mary Hladio, PMP, senior productivity and program leader at GE Aerospace in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, and Franziska Höhne, PMP, project manager for international internal auditing at ALDI in Essen, Germany.  

Key themes 

01:25 Spotting red flags in data and how people communicate and act 

04:48 Common red flags on projects: resource misallocation, scope creep and misalignment with organizational strategy 

11:28 How to handle overly ambiguous—or extremely constrictive—project specs 

15:24 Good practices for communicating red flags to the C-suite  

17:00 Creating team cultures with transparency and trust  

Transcript

Transcript 

MARY HLADIO 

Don’t be afraid to fail fast. So I think we have a tendency early on in our careers that we’re going to figure it out, and that we’re the only ones who have ever made a mistake before. 

Talk to a mentor or coach. You might have to talk through those types of things, but don’t be afraid to make those mistakes. The reason why people get to be senior leaders is because they’ve got the scars on their back of all the wars they have fought. And you’re not going to get that without a little bit of skin in the game. 

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

I love that advice. And maybe to add to that, you need strong technical skills in terms of project management skills. You need to be able to identify these red flags. Of course, you also need work experience, but it’s also kind of training how to identify these, how to handle scope and risk management.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Hey everybody. This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.  

Every industry—and every project—has its own set of risks, but some threats and warning signs are more global. Today we’re talking about how to spot those red flags and address them.  

I’m joined by Mary Hladio, senior productivity and program leader at GE Aerospace in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the United States, and also Franziska Höhne, project manager for international internal auditing at ALDI based in Essen in Germany. Welcome, Mary and Franziska.  

MARY HLADIO  

Nice to be here.   

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

Thanks for having me. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

What steps do each of you take to identify red flags from the start and throughout a project, and what tools do you use to do it? Franziska, let’s start with you. 

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

Well, as I’m working basically on change projects, I strongly rely on talking to people. So it’s about subject matter expert interviews, stakeholder interviews to determine what might be going on.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

Okay, great. Mary, how about you?  

MARY HLADIO  

The early signals when it comes to red flags are oftentimes behaviors and communication. I would echo what Franziska said. Oftentimes, it’s those silent clues that you might get or behaviors or things—people not showing up to status meetings. Those are your red flags that you would start to see before they even hit a metric on a dashboard. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

That’s interesting because it’s like working in negative space. So how do you figure out what’s a good silence or, you know, versus a troubling absence or a troubling lack of hand raised? 

MARY HLADIO  

We have a concept where we talk about “going to gemba.” It is a Japanese term. It came out of Toyota. It’s from the Toyota House of Lean. And it really means going where the work is being done. And so it’s not just relying on everyone coming to you into a status meeting or everyone providing their status report. Oftentimes you’re going to see people and see what’s happening wherever that work is being done. And you can almost kind of tell based on behaviors: when people start to avoid you or they don’t stop you in the hallway, they don’t see you at the lunch counter and say something. And then that to me is like, “Hmm. Something’s going on.”  

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

And what about the tools you use to accomplish this? Franziska, is there anything you use to support your stakeholder engagement surveys?  

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

It’s about having structured interviews on the deliverables you’re aiming for, because when it comes to talking to people, especially to subject matter experts, it makes sense to document that somehow. That’sthe one tool.   

And the other tool I personally strongly rely on is also talking to AI about potential red flags, which works for technical projects and also for my change management projects. I would say the key is to give the AI an impression of who I am, what industry I’m working on, and what type of subject matter expert I have. Because it makes a difference if you are talking to a marketing expert or if it’s an internal auditor.  

MARY HLADIO  

We have daily dashboards, right? So on Monday mornings, there is a meeting, and that meeting says, “Hey. What are we going to accomplish for the week?” Then there’s a meeting on Tuesday, which is a status meeting, and then Thursday, sort of a leadership escalation meeting. And on Friday, the core team would go, “Did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish?” So if we have really good key metrics or key performance indicators, there should be some leading indicators that will let us know something’s wrong, something’s off. And then that allows us to then go on gemba, talk to folks and see what’s happening. Where are the roadblocks before they become an issue? I think once they hit your register, it has happened. It’s almost too late. If we’re talking about spotting red flags, we want that way before it hits your register. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

What are some of the threats that can pop up across any sort of project, and then, to Mary’s point, what via experience have you learned to watch out for, for some of those universal red flags? And can those just be passed down as best practices or is that just something that sort of gets into the brain of a veteran project manager?  

MARY HLADIO  

Resources is one of those ones, I think universally, regardless of industry. Whether that resource is dedicated, whether that resource is shared; oftentimes the resource is shared. We don’t have a direct authority over those resources. I think ahead of time, what we can do before it becomes an issue is to even just state, “Are we talking 50% of this person’s time? What does that look like?” We’ve had situations like that where we’ve had someone, we were like, “Hey. You told us 50% of their time, and they’re not able to make this meeting, this meeting and this meeting. So, am I really getting 50%, or do I need to start looking for other resources?”  

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

I couldn’t agree more to what Mary just said. I observed that in different industries I’ve been working in. It’s a lot about resources, and, if you don’t mind, I’d like to add another one—when it comes to scope management, especially when it comes to defining the scope and adding things or removing things from scope as you go. Because then maybe the company or the organization tends to adjust their strategy, and then it happens that this does something to your scope. And if you don’t document that the way you should, it gets a little bit awkward from time to time when it comes to completion and deliverable fulfillment. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

Yep. I mean, these two things overlap significantly, right? Because you’re essentially talking about whether the scope of work is the right size for the resource enabled to make it happen.  

What about scope creep? You know, how do you recognize this? And do the people who are asking for more, do they acknowledge that? How do you approach that conversation? 

MARY HLADIO  

Yeah, I think I follow Franziska about the documentation. Even if it requires no time or no effort, document that something has changed in your scope. And if you can do that, you can go back—back into history—and say, “Hey, remember when you added these five components? Well, each one of them, by themselves, was nothing, but it now has adjusted enough that we have an issue and now we have to adjust that.Are we going to add more resources, or are we going to add more time, or are we going to go back to the original scope?” 

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

I would agree to what Mary just said. Adding things to scope is always an issue that we have, and what we also see is adjusting scope when thresholds change that you’re looking at. I’m thinking about an example that would be really helpful.  

Maybe if you think about the automotive industry. I’ve been working in the automotive industry for a while, and depending on the technology, especially in the development department, depending on the technology that you want to push into the market, then of course the scope will be adjusted of a project that you are developing there.  

And if this is not clearly communicated, and people dedicate a lot of time and resources to what they are just doing, and it’s not acknowledged and not as valuable or not seen as it should or appreciated as it should, then things get complicated. And people tend to be like demotivated, I guess. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

Another example I wanted to bring up is when a project is misaligned with organizational strategy. How common is that? What does it look like? What can it do to your project if you find that it’s sort of out of sync with where the company wants to row the boat? 

MARY HLADIO  

Yeah, that’s almost a daily occurrence, I think. I feel like executives have pet projects—it’s something that’s in their area and maybe they funded it or their resources are on it. And so, we actually instituted this year a strategy board. And in that strategy board, when we’ve got projects that are in conflict for whatever reason, we then bring that back to our executive leadership team and say, “You have project A and project B. They’re both using the same resources. They’re both asking for very similar outputs. Are we going to invest in both? And if the answer is yes, then here’s what needs to happen. Or are we going to redeploy resources from one project to get project A or B done and then come back and finish up the other project?” 

And those are tough decisions because people get invested. No one likes to hear, “Oh, we’re putting that project that you’ve worked so hard on on the back burner.” Because it may not ever come off the back burner because then strategy changes. 

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

Especially when it comes to adjusting organizational strategies, what happens, especially these days in Germany, is that we are hit by cost-cutting strategies or improvements. And—yeah, I see you, Mary, nodding—in our businesses, and if you have a project already running for a couple of years, or let’s say a couple of months, and they’re not aware of these organizational changes and the communication and the steering of these projects, if you don’t have someone overseeing these things, there it gets complicated. And the red flags might be seen by the project teams and the project managers themselves, but I’m not really sure if that’s escalated because you need to be quite bold as a project manager to raise your hand saying, “You know what? I think my project does not really fit into our strategy.”  

You need project managers being able to do what Mary described earlier, detecting “Are there red flags? How are people behaving? What’s going on?” You need someone being able to see: Does the scope align with the strategy? And then proceed and help the company. This is our job, basically.  

MARY HLADIO  

We had something very similar happen last year, where a project that everyone was very hot on—it was the hot project, right—and it just got to a point where it was no longer the hot project, and we had to ask ourselves, is this still really something we want to go after and put money and effort into it? Do we want to spread ourselves thin across nine different things, or do we want to do one or two things really, really well? Leadership appreciates that when you [don’t] hold onto those pet projects because they can deploy those resources. They’re like, “Oh. If you don’t need these five people, great. I’ll go put them over here in this project.” And there’s always work to be done.   

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

What about ambiguity or uncertainty? What are indicators that like, “Oh no. This is… the definition here is not as tight as it could be.” And then, B, what can go wrong when work begins on a project where things are not as tight as they need to be? 

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

I would say, if you have a strategic project, this tends to happen quite often. Because having a too-tight scope, this might work for development projects, but if it’s a strategic one, you have a scope to define. You go into the details. You talk to your stakeholders. You tend to build trust with everyone so that you get real, honest answers on all that stuff. So having a more soft scope, I would say, this is not something bad, actually. The question is why is that? Is that because senior management doesn’t know what they want? Or is it because it’s kind of a strategic direction, saying, “This is what we want to have implemented. Talk to people and just implement what you need to do.”  

MARY HLADIO  

Yeah. If I can add on to that. I mean, when you have a new-to-market strategy, when you have a new product, it’s often going to be very soft, right? We just don’t know what we don’t know, especially if we’regoing into additive materials or new technologies. I think what’s more important is, when do we draw a line in the sand? When do we say, “Everything has to be defined here, and we’ll get it in the next iteration.” Or, maybe do it in phases, and we have to re-snap that baseline. Oftentimes we let those ambiguous projects continue all the way to the very end, and we’re still not sure what we’re doing.   

But it’s okay to have some level of soft scope or ambiguity in a project, depending on what you’re trying to do. I mean, most organizations are being asked to innovate faster, go to market faster. You don’t have time to always put up the guardrails and put all the lines down. You just have to iterate. If we know that we know what we want, but we’re not sure how to get there, then I’m okay with that. We’ll figure it out along the way. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

Are there instances where the constraints are so specific that it constricts innovation, insight, iteration, all of those things? And you’ve got to step in there to sort of expand the boundaries of what was initially documented.  

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

Well, I would say here, it also comes to the why. Why is it that way? Because if you have legal requirements, it forces you to have some restrictions. And I guess this is more true for Mary than for my kind of projects, but if you have that, then you’re not going to expand anything. You just do what you’re requested to do. If it’s a question of leadership, and you have someone being very much into the details, performing this micromanagement thing, then it gets difficult and then you have a different conversation with, yeah, I guess senior management. 

MARY HLADIO  

I rarely have ever had something that just was so constrictive that we weren’t able to do something. I think it’s how it’s interpreted, and I have these conversations all the time with leadership. They’ll basically say, “This is how it is.” I’m like, “Really? Can you show me where that’s documented?” Because we’ve convinced ourselves that we could only do this, and we could only do that. “Oh, really? I was not aware of that. Can you show me the regulation or the rule or the law or whatever it might be?” And oftentimes they can’t.   

So, okay. So what can we do? What can we do within the constraints that we currently have? And you just open that conversation or reframe the conversation a little bit. And then go back and document it so that when you do your lessons learned, you can say, “Hey, by putting this artificial constraint on the team, this is ultimately what it did. And so maybe we might not want to do that again or maybe not accept that as a contract restriction” or whatever it might be.   

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

Back to this notion of communicating up when something goes awry. How do you communicate strategically to the C-suite, to leadership, etc., when there’s some sort of red flag that’s worth pushing upstream in case it merits a course correction. How do you broach that?   

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

I would say there are two things to consider that are important. One of these things is no finger pointing. Not saying, “It’s department X, Y, Z not doing what they’re expected to do.” This is the one thing, and the other one is building a backing to the information you spread by adding data to that, having proof, kind of an evidence. So it’s not only a gut feeling that they share when I have to share some red flags, but really information. Someone not having been there in all the conversations, all the meetings can understand and kind of process so that they can take or decide on the next steps.   

MARY HLADIO  

Yeah, I would agree with those points, and I would add on, if we’re escalating or bringing a problem to an executive leader, we’re also bringing a potential solution, and we’re asking. You know, oftentimes we’llsay, “What help do you need? Here’s where we’re stuck, and what would be really helpful is if you could help have a conversation with your counterpart on this other division or this other function, and help us with this roadblock.” If you can point your executive in the right way and say, “I’m bringing this issue to you. Here’s the solution, but I need your help here.” You’re not coming with just, “I have this problem. Help me.” You’re telling them how you want that help.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

How do you as a project leader create a culture on your teams where people working on the team feel comfortable to do the same thing? What do you do to create the conditions where people think when it’stime to raise a hand, I feel both safe and responsible to do that?  

MARY HLADIO  

It’s going to be how we react to this. I mean, we have to expose that same behavior we want, right? So when someone in my team comes to me and says, “Yeah, this is not working,” or “I’m stuck,” same thing we said with the executives. No pointing of fingers. What do you need? Where are you at? What problem are we trying to solve, and let’s go solve it. Let’s figure it out. What do we need to do to get to this next point? It may be that we have to escalate beyond myself to someone else.  

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

I couldn’t agree more to what you just said. It’s about building this culture and atmosphere, and you need to do that right from the beginning so that people really dare to speak up because otherwise it wouldn’twork.   

And I guess this is at least true for my projects. As we’re an international company, we have people spread all over the world, like Australia, the U.S., UK, all over in Europe. You need to build this atmosphere and this trust in a virtual and international context.   

And this is where it gets quite difficult because you have these cultures with different approaches when it comes to speaking up. If you are thinking about Germans like I am, you tend to be quite straightforward and maybe a little bit too harsh from time to time. You need to be trained, as a German, to understand when an American or an Australian is raising red flags. Learn to understand how red flags are raised in different cultures and how to collaborate in projects. And that if someone maybe says, “Oh, no worries. That’s nothing.” It doesn’t really mean, “No worries. Nothing is happening,” but it’s like, “I’m going to deal with that. Don’t take care of it.” 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

I’m like, “I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. I couldn’t have communicated more clearly that there was an issue,” but yeah. That’s not…  

MARY HLADIO  

I’ve had that. I think just to build on that and then the intercultural piece, that’s very true. I once had a half-Dutch team, and they’re very much like the Germans. They just tell it like it is, and I had to get used to that. Because it was just like, it was almost the opposite. They were always bringing problems, and I’m like, “Stop. Stop bringing me problems.” No, I mean, it was just one of those things, or they would send a message to me on the side and say, “Mary, I need to talk to you about this.” And we would problem solve, but I’d rather have that open culture and you tell me what’s going on than to not.  

But the intercultural piece is a big piece. And understanding that different cultures even within sites; certain sites are different, right? And that some of that has to do with the leader of that particular site and past projects they’ve been on or past executive leaders they’ve been [with]. And you almost have to start over again and say, “No, I’m not that leader. This project is a little bit different, and I really do want to hear your ideas and your problems. And let’s figure it all out because we succeed together.” 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

What’s a point of advice or two, or a skill that you would suggest? So if I am newer in my career or have just struggled in the past either to identify or to act upon and mitigate the risks posed by red flags, what do you suggest? Where should people start? What skills should they cultivate to become better at this? 

MARY HLADIO  

Don’t be afraid to fail fast. So I think we have a tendency early on in our careers, that we’re going to figure it out and that we’re the only ones who have ever made a mistake before, and we’re the only onewho’s ever screwed up before or have seen these issues. Don’t be afraid to pivot, change and say, “You know, this isn’t working for me.” And talk to a mentor or coach. You might have to talk through those types of things, but don’t be afraid to make those mistakes.   

The reason why people get to be senior leaders is because they’ve got the scars on their back of all the wars they have fought. Right? And you’re not going to get that without a little bit of skin in the game.  

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

I love that advice. And maybe to add to that, you need strong technical skills in terms of project management skills. You need to be able to identify these red flags. Of course, you also need work experience, but it’s also kind of a training, how to identify these, how to handle scope and risk management. That’s one side. And the other one, maybe to add to Mary’s point, fail fast and then learn how to communicate that. Be bold and communicate.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Mary, Franziska, thanks very much. This has been an awesome conversation.  

MARY HLADIO  

Thank you, Steve.  

FRANZISKA HÖHNE  

Thank you, Steve.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

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