Extreme heat setbacks railways for the same reason unexpected setbacks break IT projects: they’re built for normal. Here’s how PMaaS builds in the flex to cope.
It happens every time.
Proper hot weather arrives and everything falls apart around us.
On the railways, for instance, the rails are at risk of buckling, trains can’t run at full speed if they run at all, and some rail operators are advising passengers not to travel.
Cue the national pastime: complaining about it!
We’ve all observed, “Other countries manage far worse weather without grinding to a halt,” and asked, “Why can’t we just build infrastructure that copes?”.
And that’s the thing.
None of this is about incompetence.
I take my hat off to everyone dealing with hot weather complications as part of their working day, especially in public facing roles having to explain the reality to increasingly exasperated customers. I even have sympathy with those in control of budgets, to a degree, as nobody builds heat-resistant rail for the three-days-a-year that they’d actually get used.
It wouldn’t make financial sense.
So, everything gets built for normal, and normal works just fine.
Right up until … it doesn’t.
It’s the same in IT Projects!
SAME LOGIC, DIFFERENT INDUSTRY
IT projects run on exactly the same principle, “built for normal” and most IT Directors know this better than anyone.
Teams get resourced for business as usual. The project plan assumes a steady state: the right people, available at the right time, doing roughly what was scoped. And for the most part, that holds up fine.
Then the freak event lands.
Your star PM hands in their notice three weeks before go-live. The sponsor changes scope for the second time this month. Two projects you didn’t expect to collide both need the same specialist at the same time, and there’s only one of them.
Like the railways, that’s rarely bad planning. It’s what happens when you’ve optimised for normal conditions rather than exceptional ones. Slack costs money every day it sits unused, so organisations naturally build for normal.
You can’t keep a spare senior PM on the bench all year just in case someone leaves, and you can’t permanently overstaff a PMO against scope changes that might not happen. Anyone running a budget would (rightly) ask you whether you’d gone mad, or at least ask you to justify such spend, and you wouldn’t be able to.
THE BIT NOBODY BUDGETS FOR
So, what does happen when a freak event hits a team with no slack?
You’ve lived it, you know.
Usually, it’s as a case of whoever’s closest to the problem … just absorbs it.
You end up with a PM doing their own job plus the job of the person who’s just left. Often, governance slips because there’s no time to report on progress when you’re busy trying to make progress. Consequently, decisions that should take a day can take a fortnight (usually because the person who’d normally make the call is buried in firefighting), and the project that was on course quietly drifts off course long before anyone’s willing to say so out loud.
It’s not dramatic.
It’s just slow, expensive drift. The kind that’s hard to point at until you’re three months downstream wondering how your project that looked fine in March is in real trouble by June.
WHY THE ANSWER ISN’T “BUILD MORE RESILIENCE IN”
The tempting fix is to build in more permanent capacity.
Bigger PMO, more bench depth and strength, a bit of headroom everywhere.
It’s the equivalent of asking the rail network to be built for the hottest day of the decade as standard.
I mean it would work BUT it would also cost a fortune.
Capacity that sits idle most of the time is expensive, and someone has to pay for it. Somewhere, there’s a passenger wondering why a day return to Ipswich now requires a small mortgage, or your client looking at a project invoice with their jaw on the floor.
Rather than build capacity, in IT project management, we can build-in contingency.
Again, there’s a lesson from the rail operators: when my colleague’s train was cancelled due to extreme heat, the rail company drafted in a fleet of air conditioned, luxury coaches. Nobody enjoys hearing ‘rail replacement bus’, but on a 40° sweltering station platform, it’s a lot better than no journey at all.
They don’t own a fleet of coaches sitting unused in the bus garage all summer. They have relationships with operators who can provide capacity when it’s needed.
And that’s the value of IT Project Management as a Service.
You’re not paying to maintain spare project management capacity all year on the off chance something goes wrong. You’re paying for the ability to bring in experienced delivery support the moment something does, whether that’s a sudden vacancy, a scope curveball, or three priorities landing in the same week, and then scaling it back down once things have settled.
Freak events happen, by definition, when you’re not expecting them.
When the unexpected lands, with PMaaS and Ron’s Luxury Coach Travel, you’ve got somewhere to turn.
In IT Projects, that means not asking an already stretched team to somehow absorb it!
WORTH ASKING YOURSELF
Here’s a great question.
Which of your projects is currently relying on everything going exactly to plan?
Because that’s usually the one that gets caught out first.
It’s not a criticism. Projects rarely fail because everything goes wrong. They fail because one unexpected thing went wrong, and there was no capacity left to absorb it.
And that’s just how most teams are built, and for good financial reasons, but it’s worth knowing where those points are, because that’s where the next freak event is most likely to do real damage.
If you’d like to talk through where PMaaS could give YOU that flex without the standing cost, we’re always happy to have that conversation.
Finally, I’m writing this during the exceptionally hot summer of 2026, if you’re reading it at the same time – stay safe and hydrated!!