When Project Managers Spend More Time Projecting Than Managing

I was working for a printing company as a graphic designer, and we had this one client that made up a good percentage of our business — like 35% of our business.

They had a major project come up that was in a time crunch and worth millions of dollars to them.

They came to us and asked us if we could take care of the printing of these materials for their proposal; 250 sets of the final proposal had to be printed and bound using super-nice luxury materials, special foil on the front, etc., and the proposal was 150 pages, double-sided, with tabbed sections.

Everything had to be custom-made, even the tabs and cover.

It was a disaster from the start. The client gave us the wrong version of the proposal, so we had to stop printing mid-print.

Then, they changed the cover, which meant changing the size of the cover (oversize) and redoing the metal plates for the foil.

Then, they had more changes to the proposal inside — two days before it was due.

What they submitted was filled with spelling errors and grammar errors.

I went through and fixed all the errors, fixed their margins, and made it look stunning, adding in graphs that didn’t look right or match their stats and making it look like a showstopper.

For forty-eight hours, another employee and I worked our a**es off getting this project printed, assembled, bound, and boxed, ready to go.

My boss and I personally delivered it to our client’s office.

The project manager saw the final version and started screaming at me for fixing her mistakes, etc., telling me that they were going to lose this proposal, that it was all my fault, and that we had printed the wrong version.

My boss interrupted her and told her to f*** off. He said that I had spent two full days at the office, not even sleeping, to make her half-a**ed project done on time and that I had spent precious time fixing her mistakes after she had sent us incomplete materials and non-standard files.

Little did I know that he’d kept a copy of the mistake-ridden proposal and bound one as a before and after case study.

He took me, a finished proposal, and the mistake proposal up to the president of the company — someone who he knew really, really, well and had worked with for years. My boss handed him the two versions and told him that we weren’t going to work with them anymore based on the reactions of this project manager.

The president was shocked that his employee had acted like that. He then looked over the finished project, saw how beautiful it was, and thanked me personally.

They went on to win the proposal, in part because it made them look super-professional.

After they won the proposal, the president called me, the other a**-busting employee, and our boss into his office, treated us to lunch, and then gave us a check for $15,000 for helping them win the proposal as a bonus.

My boss gave me half and the other employee half for our efforts in getting the project done; he didn’t keep a dime for himself.

We did keep them as clients, but we never had to work with that a**hole project manager lady again.