Hall, new to project management, might well not have recognized that need herself. Hall was not given a promotion with this task. However, she was given considerable extra responsibility, and it seems possible that she did not get enough support from her own department, which may have contributed to her difficulties. It seems that her range of authority was not clear, both to the people loaned to her by other departments and to the people running those departments. This kind of communication is not something she could have reasonably accomplished, since the task assignment did not come with a promotion. Hall did not always handle things perfectly, but she is not alone in that regard.
Hall does not deserve to be fired, but she is also not ready to be promoted. However, if interdepartmental responsibilities are made more clear in the future, Hall might turn out to be a very good project manager and a good candidate for promotion.
5. Evaluate -- in an overall way -- the use of project management by the Division of Social services.
Based on Hall's experience, it seems possible that the Directors of the various departments within the Division of Social Services may engage in some level of "turf wars," at least sometimes. If this is so, Hall's project would be a perfect situation for such interdepartmental positioning and posturing to occur, because her authority was less than clear. Hall most have some real strengths, or her Director would never have given her the task, and yet she herself did not seem to clearly know what authority she had to make sure the job got done. Obviously the was the leader for her team, but her team members did not report to her. It seems very clear that interdepartmental cooperation may not have been the norm at the Division of Social Services, because consistently, the team members chose work from their own departments over the demands of the disbursement project, even though they clearly knew the deadline. It seems unlikely that Hall would not have communicated that to them.
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