Chapter 13
IN THIS CHAPTER
Confirming team member assignments and filling in any gaps
Developing your team’s identity along with its operating procedures
Creating systems and schedules for project control
Introducing your project with an official announcement
Laying the groundwork for the post-project review
After intense work on a tight schedule, you submit your project plan (the single document that integrates and consolidates your project’s scope statement, stakeholder register, work breakdown structure, responsibility assignment matrix, schedule, resource requirements, budget, and all subsidiary plans for providing project support services) for review and approval. A few days later, your manager comes to you and says,
Starting off your project correctly is a key to ultimate success. Your project plan describes what you’ll produce, the work you’ll do, how you’ll do it, when you’ll do it, and which resources you’ll need to do it. When you write your project plan, you base it on the information you have at the time, and, if information isn’t available, you make assumptions. The more time between your plan’s completion and its approval, the more changes you’re likely to find in your plan’s assumptions as you actually start your project.
As you prepare to start your project, reconfirm or update the information in your plan, determine or reaffirm which people will play roles in your project and exactly what those roles will be, and prepare the systems and procedures that will support your project’s performance. This chapter tells you how to accomplish these tasks and get your project off to a strong start.
A project stakeholder is a person or group that supports, is affected by, or is interested in your project (see Chapter 4 for details on how to identify project stakeholders). In your project plan, you describe the roles you expect people to play and the amount of effort you expect team members to invest. You identify the people by name, by title or position, or by the skills and knowledge they need.
This section shows you how to reaffirm who will be involved in your project. It also helps you make sure everyone’s still on board — and tells you what to do if some people aren’t.
To confirm the identities of the people who’ll work to support your project, you have to verify that specific people are still able to uphold their promised commitments and, if necessary, recruit new people to fulfill any remaining gaps.
Inform them that your project has been approved and when the work will start.
Not all project plans get approved. You rarely know in advance how long the approval process will take or how soon your project can start. Inform team members as soon as possible so they can schedule the necessary time.
Confirm that they’re still able to support your project.
People’s workloads and other commitments may change between the time you prepare your plan and your project’s approval. If a person is no longer able to provide the promised support, recruit a replacement as soon as possible (see the later section “Filling in the blanks” for guidelines).
Explain what you’ll do to develop the project team and start the project work.
Provide a list of all team members and others who will support the project. Also mention the steps you’ll take to introduce members and kick off the project.
Reconfirm the work you expect them to perform, the schedules and deadlines you expect them to keep, and the amount of time you expect them to spend on the work.
Clarify specific activities and the nature of the work to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Depending on the size and formality of your project, you can use any format from a quick email to a formal work-order agreement to share this information with the people who will be involved in your project.
As Figure 13-1 illustrates, a typical work-order agreement includes the following information:
Other people may also play a role in your project’s success, even though they may not officially be members of your project team. Two such groups are drivers (people who have a say in defining the results of your project) and supporters (people who will perform a service or provide resources for your team).
Two other special stakeholders are your project champion and your project executive sponsor. Both are people in high positions in the organization who strongly support your project; who will advocate for your project in disputes, planning meetings, and review sessions; and who will take necessary actions to help ensure your project’s success (see Chapter 4 for more on these different types of project stakeholders).
Contact your project champion and all other drivers and supporters to:
If your plan identifies proposed project team members only by job title, position description, or skills and knowledge (and not by specific names), you have to find actual people to fill the specified roles. You can fill the empty roles by assigning responsibility to someone already on your organization’s staff, by recruiting a person from outside your organization, or by contracting with an external organization. If you don’t have the authority to hire a person yourself, work with the functional manager to whom the new hire will report.
Whichever method you choose, prepare a written description of the activities you want each person to perform. This description can range from a bulleted list in email for informal projects to a written job description for more formal ones.
If you plan to look inside your organization to recruit team members for roles not yet filled, do the following:
Also, if you plan to obtain the support of external consultants, work with your organization’s contracts office. Provide the contracts office with the same information that you provide your HR office. Review the contract document before your contracting officer signs it.
In addition to filling your empty team member roles, work with people in key organizational units to identify people, other than team members, who will support your project (for example, a contracts specialist or a procurement specialist, as long as they aren’t officially on your project team). After you identify these people, do the following:
For example, let’s say your organization, a contract e-commerce website development firm, is structured by business units aligned to specific markets within the retail industry, such as apparel, home goods and furniture, sporting goods, electronics, and so on. You are tasked with initiating a project within your business unit to develop an e-commerce website for a well-known online apparel retailer. However, you have recently learned that all of your business unit’s Java developers are assigned to other long-term apparel projects for the next six months. Your client expects their website to be live in six months! In speaking with your colleagues in other business units, you learn that they are not experiencing the same resource drought and, in fact, are even considering the need to downsize their existing staff. Does it really matter, in this particular example, if the Java developers assigned to your team routinely work on apparel projects or would competent (and available) developers from the electronics or sporting goods business units have the same skills and ability to translate your project’s requirements into technically-sound Java software code? With an open mind and some creative thinking, you may be able to turn this scenario into a win-win for everyone!
Merely assigning people to tasks doesn’t create a project team. A team is a collection of people who are committed to common goals and who depend on one another to do their jobs. Project teams consist of members who can and must make a valuable and unique contribution to the project.
A team is different from other associations of people who work together. For example
This section discusses how to begin creating your team’s identity by having members review and discuss the project plan, examine overall team and individual team member goals, agree on everyone’s roles, and start to establish productive working relationships.
Team members who contributed to the proposal can remind themselves of the project’s background and purpose, their planned roles, and the work to be done. They can also identify situations and circumstances that may have changed since the proposal was prepared and then review and reassess project risks and risk management plans.
New team members can understand the project’s background and purpose, find out about their roles and assignments, raise concerns about timeframes and budgets, and identify issues that may affect the project’s success.
Team members commit to your project when they believe their participation can help them achieve worthwhile professional and personal goals. Help team members develop and buy into a shared sense of the project goals by doing the following:
Nothing causes disillusionment and frustration faster than bringing motivated people together and then giving them no guidance on how to work with one another. Two or more people may start doing the same activity independently, and other activities may be overlooked entirely. Eventually, these people gravitate toward tasks that don’t require coordination, or they gradually withdraw from the project to work on more rewarding assignments.
To prevent this frustration from becoming a part of your project, work with team members to define the activities that each member works on, the nature of their roles, and the impact of their contributions to the team as a whole. Possible team member roles include the following:
Develop the procedures that you and your team will use to support your day-to-day work. Having these procedures in place allows people to perform their tasks effectively and efficiently; it also contributes to a positive team atmosphere. At a minimum, develop procedures for the following:
On high-performance project teams, members trust each other and have cordial, coordinated working relationships. But developing trust and effective work practices takes time and concerted effort.
With most projects, the question isn’t if disagreements will occur between team members; it’s when. So you need to be prepared to resolve those differences of opinion with a conflict resolution plan that includes one or both of the following:
Throughout the life of a project, conflicts may arise around a myriad of professional, interpersonal, technical, and administrative issues. The first step toward minimizing the negative consequences of such conflicts is to avoid them before they occur. The following tips can help you do just that:
If a conflict does arise, one or more of the participants in the conflict or one or more people with knowledge of the issues around which the conflict arose need to take an active role to resolve the conflict. The person or people chosen for this task should have knowledge of the conflict and the issues surrounding it, the techniques of proactive conflict resolution, the respect of the people involved in the conflict, and no preconceived preferences or biases for any of the solutions of the people involved in the conflict. Whether they informally assume the responsibility to help resolve the conflict or are assigned by the project manager or another member of management to do so, they should do the following:
As you work to understand the reasons for a conflict, note that conflicts can arise over one or more of the following:
Keep in mind that personal beliefs about each of these four types of information can be due to:
Suppose that Perla and Jimmy have been assigned to develop recommendations for how to improve the production of a poorly performing unit in their company. After reviewing some related reports and having a few discussions, Perla has decided the best way to improve performance is to fire two of the four people in the unit and retrain the other two. In contrast, Jimmy has decided the only way to improve the unit’s performance is to fire all four people.
At the moment, Perla and Jimmy are at a standoff, but if they’re willing, they can take one of the following approaches to resolve their conflict:
As you consider these possible resolutions, keep in mind the following two points:
When team members trust each other, have confidence in each other’s abilities, can count on each other’s promises, and communicate openly, they can devote all their efforts to performing their project work instead of spending their time dealing with interpersonal frustrations.
Help your team achieve this high-performance level of functioning by guiding it through the following stages:
Storming: This stage involves raising and resolving personal conflicts about the project or other team members. As part of the storming stage, do the following:
Initially, you can speak privately with people about issues you’re uncomfortable bringing up in front of the entire team. Eventually, though, you must discuss their concerns with the entire team to achieve a sense of mutual honesty and trust.
Norming: This stage involves developing the standards and operating guidelines that govern team member behavior. Encourage members to establish these team norms instead of relying on the procedures and practices they use in their functional areas. Examples of these norms include:
At a team meeting, encourage people to discuss how team members should behave in different situations. Address the concerns people express and encourage the group to adopt team norms. Establish ground rules for what is and is not appropriate conduct during meetings, including whether or not it is acceptable for meeting attendees to read and send emails or if side conversations are allowed while someone is addressing the entire room.
Controlling your project throughout its performance requires that you collect appropriate information, evaluate your performance compared with your plan, and share your findings with your project’s stakeholders. This section highlights the steps you take to prepare to collect, analyze, and share this information (see Chapter 14 for full details on maintaining control of your project).
Effective project control requires that you have accurate and timely information to help you identify problems promptly and take appropriate corrective action. This section highlights the information you need and explains how to get it.
Throughout your project, you need to track the following key performance indicators, or KPIs:
See Chapter 14 for a detailed discussion of the information systems you can use to track your project’s progress.
If you use existing, enterprise-wide information systems to track your project’s schedule performance and resource use, set up your project on these systems as follows (see Chapter 14 for information on how to decide whether to use existing information systems to support your project’s monitoring and control):
Set up charge codes for your project in the organization’s labor tracking system. If team members record their labor hours by projects, set up charge codes for all WBS activities. Doing so allows you to monitor the progress of individual WBS elements, as well as the total project.
If your organization’s system can limit the number of hours for each activity, enter those limits (see the later section “Setting your project’s baseline” as well as Chapter 14 for how to establish targets for your project’s schedule, resource needs, and budget). Doing so ensures that people don’t inadvertently charge more hours to activities than your plan allows.
To be sure you satisfy your information needs and those of your project’s stakeholders, set up a recurring schedule of status reports you’ll prepare and meetings you’ll hold during the project. Planning your communications with your stakeholders in advance helps ensure that you adequately meet their individual needs and allows them to reserve time on their calendars to attend the meetings.
Meet with project stakeholders and team members to develop a schedule for regular project meetings and progress reports. Confirm the following details:
See Chapter 15 for a discussion of the reports and meetings you can use to support ongoing project communications.
The project baseline is the version of your project’s plan that guides your project activities and provides the comparative basis for your performance assessments. At the beginning of your project, use the plan that was approved at the end of the organizing-and-preparing stage, modified by any approved changes made during the carrying-out-the-work stage, as your baseline (see Chapter 1 for a discussion of the project life cycle stages). During the project, use the most recent approved version of the project plan as your baseline (see Chapter 14 for more discussion on setting, updating, and using your project’s baseline to control your project).
After you’ve notified your key project stakeholders (that is, the drivers and supporters) that your project has been approved and when it’ll start, you have to introduce it to others who may be interested (known as observers; see Chapter 4 for a discussion of how to identify the observers among your project’s stakeholders). Consider one or more of the following approaches to announce your project to all interested parties:
A project retrospective (which we discuss in detail in Chapter 17) is a meeting in which you:
Start laying groundwork for the project retrospective as soon as your project begins to make sure you capture all relevant information and observations about the project to discuss at the retrospective meeting. Lay the groundwork by doing the following:
Table 13-1 notes topics in this chapter that may be addressed on the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification exam and that are also included in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition (PMBOK 7).
TABLE 13-1 Chapter 13 Topics in Relation to the PMP Exam and PMBOK 7
Topic | Location in This Chapter | Location in PMBOK 7 | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
Finalizing team members’ project assignments | 2.2. Team Performance Domain | The steps discussed in both books are similar. | |
Recruiting resources from outside the organization | 2.4.3. Project Team Composition and Structure | Both sources discuss similar approaches for obtaining the personnel required to staff the project team. | |
Helping the team establish project and personal goals, individual roles, and team processes and relationships | 2.2. Team Performance Domain 2.2.4.4. Interpersonal Skills 4.2.6. Project Team Development Models | The steps for developing a team presented in both books are similar. This book highlights the individual and project elements that help to create a focused team. PMBOK 7 presents models for several of the team processes discussed here. | |
Managing conflicts | 2.2.4.4. Interpersonal Skills 4.2.7.1. Conflict Model 4.2.7.2. Negotiation | Both books note that project team success depends heavily on the ability of project managers to manage conflicts. PMBOK 7 lists multiple conflict resolution strategies. This book discusses how to apply conflict resolution strategies and presents examples. | |
Scheduling project meetings and progress reports | 2.5.4. Project Communications and Engagement 2.1.1. Stakeholder Engagement 4.4.3. Meetings and Events 4.6.7. Reports | Both books emphasize the need to plan regular project meetings and project progress reports in advance. This book lists information that should be addressed in these plans; see Chapter 15 for more on alternative communication approaches. |