6 years ago, I was putting the finishing touches to a book about project management in HR.
(I know, I know… bear with me)
And the chapter that gets the most reaction, every single time, is the one called “Houston… We Have A Problem.” Not because it’s the most useful chapter
(it’s actually the setup for the book)
but because it’s the one where people feel seen
(there’s a reason I say that this book is the wisdom of my battle scars)
Here’s what I know.
HR has been running on fumes for as long as most of us can remember. The inbox is relentless. The fires are constant. And the reward for surviving today is getting to survive again tomorrow.
We’ve built entire careers on this. We’ve been recognized for it. Promoted for it. We wear it like a badge.
And somewhere along the way, we stopped noticing that we’d replaced accountability for delivery with something much less useful: accountability for endurance.
Think about that for a second.
When was the last time someone in your HR function was held accountable for a project outcome? Not for effort. Not for hours worked. Not for being visibly busy and responsive.
For the outcome
(I’ll wait)
The honest answer, for most HR teams, is that project accountability barely exists. Projects start with energy. They get staffed informally. Someone volunteers, or gets volunteered, in a meeting. And then the slow erosion begins.
The sponsor
(if one is even assigned)
cancels check-ins.
Team members miss deadlines because theur “day job” takes priority.
Scope drifts because someone raised a concern and it was easier to absorb it than to push back.
And six months later, when someone asks whatever happened to that initiative, the answer is a shrug and a pivot to the next fire.
Yes, this is self-sabotage. And it’s systemic.
It’s a choice.
We don’t fail at projects because we lack ideas or talent, but because we’ve been conditioned to treat structured work as a luxury, something we’ll get to when the fires die down
(Spoiler alert: the fires never die down)
The three signals I see over and over again:
- First, absence of accountability for project delivery. Nobody owns the outcome. Nobody answers for it. The project just… fades to DOA.
- Second, scope paralysis. “We can’t change anything unless we change everything.” So we bolt on adjacent workstreams until the project collapses under its own weight, and then we blame complexity.
- Third, protective involvement. We staff project teams to represent every faction, every stakeholder group, every potential objector. The team swells to four or five times its necessary size, and every meeting becomes a negotiation instead of a working session.
(If you’ve ever been on a project team with 15 people and wondered why nothing is moving forward… now you know)
All three of these are driven by the same root cause: risk aversion. We are fundamentally a risk management function, and that instinct tips over into decision avoidance the moment something feels uncomfortable.
So we don’t make the decision. We don’t pin our opinion to the wall. We don’t establish a paper trail.
And nothing moves forward.
Here’s where it gets interesting though.
Every HR leader I’ve ever worked with, every single one, has told me some version of:
“I wish we could spend more time on strategic work.”
Succession planning. Leadership readiness. Culture. Employee experience. The good stuff. The stuff that actually moves the needle.
And every time, the reason they can’t get to it is the same: they’re buried in the operational chaos of unstructured work.
The irony is painful. The very discipline that would free them up to do the strategic work they crave is the discipline they keep putting off because they’re too busy fighting fires.
Project management isn’t sexy. I get it. It sounds like overhead. Like bureaucracy. Like someone trying to impose a process on a function that already has too many processes.
It’s none of those things.
At its core, project management in HR is simply this: know what you’re doing, know who’s doing it, know what decisions need to be made, and track whether it’s working.
That’s it.
Define the scope. Assign the right people
(and only the right people)
Capture decisions so they don’t get mysteriously un-decided. Track issues so they don’t get buried in meeting notes. And check status without needing a weekend of spreadsheet archaeology.
When you do those things, something remarkable happens. Work gets done. Faster. Cleaner. With less drama.
And those strategic conversations your HR leadership team keeps deferring? Suddenly there’s room for them.
I built VPMHR because the tools I needed to manage HR projects and programs properly didn’t exist in one place, so I built them.
If any of this sounds familiar
(and, oh, how I suspect it does)
there’s a sandbox you can walk through. Real data, real scenarios, no sign-up required. Feel free to take a look around.
app.vpmhr.com/sandbox.php
And if you’re curious about the book that started all this, “Project Management for Human Resources”
(also available on Amazon)
