At the end of this module you will be able to:

01 Understand how HR links to Project Management

02 Learn new tips for managing Project’s team

03 Better plan distribution of responsibilities and roles among project’s team

04 Valorize the performance of your people

The very first resource of a Project Manager is represented by his/her team. Before managing finances, tasks, activities and technologies, project managers deal with people on a daily basis.

On a daily basis, project managers interface with their staff with reference to their…

…which is to assure for:
• New solutions that helps people in developing (new) skills
• Feedback mechanisms for improvement
• Constructive criticism not as a reproach but as an opportunity for continuous development

Be transparent

• Use transparent methods (mutual respect)

• Use transparent tools (making everyone’s responsibilities clear)
 

Keep Communicating

• Provide honest and constructive feedback

• Use all the communication tools available (teleworking, working across time zones)
 

Encourage collaboration

• Define the working teams mixing their skills and behaviours

• Work on shared online platforms (real-time updates on shared documents)
 

Trust your team to do their job

• Learn the “delegation art”

• Keep an overview of team and project progress

Correlate the skills/expertise that you need to your people’s talents

Such as…

As we mentioned already, the positive outcome of a project is firstly and foremost a matter of people that worked on its results – and how they engaged their energies, experiences and know-how.

Nevertheless, managing people is never easy, specifically in Project Management, a discipline that is extremely diverse in terms of content, scale and scope.

You can be most certainly sure that poor motivation and lack of commitment of project team will lead as results to very poor performances…

Lack of a strong leadership – or the perception of such – produces some highly dysfunctional backfires.

When project managers fails to put people on board and disseminate a common vision of project’s background and expected objectives, project team’s reactions can lead to two typical effects:

 Entropy – people try to do their best without really understanding what they are doing and why.

Immobility – people prefer to save their energies and efforts rather than committing to something they have no clue of.

The common tendency of project’s team is pretending to do something, without going anywhere…like upside-down turtles.

Entropy typically generates when guidelines, resources, key milestones and shares of roles and responsibilities are not clear, but things need to be done regardless…

“…but people could simply ask if they do not understand!”

This is not necessarily true, specifically if people fear the prejudice of judgement upon their performance.

Transparent, open and trust-based communication between project team and project managers can help avoiding this unpleasant situation.

Immobility typically generates when there is a lack of communication among the many groups of interest involved into the project, so when:

Immobility is a very dangerous scenario not per se, but because there is the concrete risk of accumulating workload that will be very difficult to process in a later moment.

¡¡ Keep in mind that someone is expecting something from some others !!

It is commonly said that objectives should be challenging so as to motivate people in their achievements.

This belief can be very tricky. We prefer to say that objectives should be realistic and engaging.

Project managers do not need to challenge themselves

✔ Project managers are expected to do what they can do with the given time and resources

You do not motivate people by “challenging” them, you motivate people by making things clear, engage their opinions and intakes, preparing them for what comes next.

A project can be observed from two different perspectives – equally relevant and valid.

• The Bottom-up dimension

Project team detains a unique perspective on how the practical implementation/development of the project is going – but they might lack the macro-picture to which this project is framed into. From their perspective, some things might seem redundant, marginal, without any actual ratio.

• The Top-Down dimension

Project manager detains some information that might not be accessible to project team. Those same things that some might not comprehend, makes perfect sense once we look at the overall scale and scope of the project. But on the other, project mangers might ignore critical signals disclosed by the “frontline”.

As project managers, make sure to go into trenches with your team and combine their know how of the project with your understanding of its wide range impact.

Whenever a new project officer is assigned to an on-going project, there are always few difficulties to address:

More in general, picking up a project of which you have not been a part of since its genesis can be very challenging (time consuming and energy demanding) and demotivating.

This typically happens when project managers wish to have a comprehensive understanding of the project from the bottom-up, without getting dirty in the mud of the trench…

Monitoring, reporting and evaluation should be a concern of project team, but at the same time this set of tasks should not become a tangle for people working on project’s implementation.

Again, a sound and fair organisation and arrangement of work load should help you in gaining the information that you need in the due time.

In other words, those in charge of project’s implementation remain in support of Quality Assurance and Monitoring team, without that reporting translated into their concern.

Remember (now you know about):

01 Provide for clear guidance and make sure that all people are on the same “frequency”

02 Avoid redundancies, use plain language 

03 Facilitate a bottom-up transfer of information