Soft Skills

People side of project management

Managing people resources well is the key to a successful project, writes G P Sudhakar.

Team work is the backbone for the success of any project. Starting from recruitment of the project team members to releasing them from the project, it is the project manager who is in charge. If the team size is big, there will be a project management team to manage the project and team members. The project manager recruits team members, trains, develops and manages them. It is his responsibility to plan the communications in the project. Everybody in the project may not need all the information. It is the project manager who categorises the information and distributes it to the correct stakeholders.

Human resource planning

The project manager is responsible for planning the human resources for the project. Usually projects require maximum number of people during peak time and minimum number during initiation and closing times. The project manager should try to utilise the available resources and he acquires more, if needed. He can make use of resource graphs. While assigning the team members to the projects it is advisable to assign them based on their skill set and interests. For example, young engineers may like to work in advanced technologies and experienced resources may like to stick to their legacy technologies. Taking their interests into consideration reduces the attrition rate from the project.

Acquiring team members

The project manager uses many techniques to acquire a project team. The main technique is the negotiation. He negotiates with the fellow project/line managers to acquire key team members. Sometimes team members will be pre-assigned. Some highly skilled resources are very expensive and their availability is very rare. In this kind of scenarios, the project manager should plan ahead and try to get the highly skilled resources needed for the project.

The reputation of the team members is related to the success of the project. If they think that the project is not going to be successful, they try to leave the project. The project manager should handle this situation delicately. In acquiring team members, he should choose those who meet the expectations.

Developing talent

It is the project manager who cares for the welfare of the team members. He has formal, reward, punish, referral and expert powers to use on the team members. The expert power is the powerful tool sometimes. With the knowledge and technical skills, the project manager can gain expert power and can use it on the team. While acquiring team members, the project manager should assess their technical skills. He should assess the needed skills and if there is any gap, the project manager should provide training to them.

Mentoring employees

Providing mentors to the young engineers is very important in grooming their careers. These days MNCs like Siemens and IBM are providing mentors to all employees when they join the company. These mentors are very experienced in their field and will be able to guide young engineers in their technical and non-technical issues.

Managing the team

It is a best practice to provide continuous feedback on performance to the team members. Many organisations are including the 360 degree feedback for their employees in their performance appraisals. It is better to set objectives to team members when new people join or at the beginning of the appraisal period.

Best practice is to measure the performance against the objectives set earlier. It is better to keep all the performance measurement factors in quantitative terms rather than keeping in qualitative terms. It is the project manager’s responsibility to release the team whenever the work is complete. If there exists conflict between team members, they are responsible to resolve it. If they need any help, they can come to the project manager. In those kinds of situations, confrontation is the best conflict resolution technique a project manager can use. Other conflict resolution techniques include smoothing, compromising, withdrawal and forcing.

The main reason for the conflict among team members is the schedules. Other reasons include cost, technical issues, resources, priorities, and personality problems.

Communications management

A project manager can manage the communications in the project. But he is not having control over the all existing communication channels in the team.

If the project consists of ‘n’ number of team members, there exists n* (n-1) number of communication channels in the project. Hence, the project manager does not have time to control all these communication channels.

However, he can control the information being passed to all the team members in the project.

Information distribution and status reporting

The project manager should identify what information is to be distributed and to whom.

Once this identification is over, he can then distribute the information to the stakeholders on timely basis. He should note down all needs, wants and expectations of the stakeholders.

The project status information is to reach all the stakeholders according to the communication plan. The project manager has to manage the stakeholders.

If there is any problem with a stakeholder, the project manager has to meet with that stakeholder for an open discussion. All the time the project manager should try to solve the actual problem.

G P Sudhakar, PMP is an IT and Management Consultant in UK.
E-mail: purna24@hotmail.com