The first blog article I ever wrote on the topic of project management addressed the concept that project management, at its core, is people management. A lot of project managers are drawn to our discipline for the organizational skills and process management, for procurement procedures and risk or quality management. These are all incredibly important and can’t be neglected on any project. However, the project team is the most essential element in the success or failure of any large endeavor. As a project manager, you have a team whose job it is to satisfy the project charter. Sometimes that team is made up of employees of your organization, sometimes they are freelance contractors, sometimes they are employees of vendor organizations. Regardless, as the project manager, it is your job to manage this team and hopefully inspire them to perform at a high level and achieve efficiency when completing the project’s work product. There are some tips and tricks to help achieve these goals that I will share today. However, the TL:DR of this article is this: Treat people with respect, give them the tools they need to accomplish the job and then get out of their way. Let’s take a look at some of the ways we can set up teams to succeed as a project manager.
Once you have defined the project charter, identified requirements and obtained organizational approval, one of the most important things you can do as a PM is determine the resources you need to accomplish your goals. Resources can come in many forms. There are equipment resources such as hardware or software needed. Material resources involve consumables that will be utilized during a project such as paint or concrete on a construction project. Cost resources are vital for almost any project. They dictate things like travel or food expenses. But the most important resource on almost any project are the human resources, the people that will complete the work. People are what allow you to implement critical tactics like crashing or fast-tracking. People are what provide you with progress updates and tick off key performance indicators. People are what actually get the job done.
The right or wrong mix and types of people can make your life much easier or a living hell. The best way I’ve found to identify necessary team roles is to sit down and look at the work product to be created. Evaluate the needs based on your experience, but don’t be afraid to enlist the help of subject matter experts within your organization when you aren’t confident in your decisions. Take things like budget and timing into consideration, but also know what your ideal project team would look like if you did not have to work within those types of constraints. You may not be able to assemble that ideal project team, but it will help you prepare if your project sponsor or other executives ask you how to increase speed or output quality at any point during the project. Always know your best-case-scenario, so you can ramp up to that quickly if the budget or timing priorities of your organization change.
Depending on your organization’s authority matrix, you may not have much control over the type of resources you hire. Sometimes project managers are viewed as merely shepherds, only given the role of coordinating the tasks of resources who are managed by functional departments outside of the PM’s purview. But even in a weak matrix organization like that, you can exert influence when it comes to your project team. Influence is a powerful tool in the project manager’s toolbox. Sometimes influence is the better tool to use even when you do have control. Most people respond much better to a request than a demand. When trying to recruit a new team member, sell them on the advantages of your project. Maybe it’s a high-profile undertaking that will raise their profile in your organization. Perhaps it is good experience working on a new technology that will enhance their resume. Maybe you will have weekly happy hours that provide the opportunity for socializing with other departments. Try to be empathetic and understand what is in it for them. This goes for conversations with functional managers as well. If you are trying to get them to assign you a specific person, try to make the case why it will benefit them to allow a resource to work on your project.
If you work in a strong matrix organization where you have been given full managerial control over your project team, use this control judiciously. It starts by hiring the right people. The best advice I can give you when hiring is to be patient. Sometimes you are anxious to pull the trigger on the first person that appears to be qualified. That might be the right decision, but it might not. If you are hiring for a particular skillset, it’s important to verify an applicant is as competent as they claim. In web development, lots of developers will claim they know JavaScript. But familiarity and proficiency are very different things. Seeing examples of an applicant’s output from past projects will help you to know if they fit what you need. Again, if you don’t feel confident evaluating a particular technical skill, seek out a subject matter expert who can help you. These same guidelines apply when hiring contractors or looking to negotiate a contract with a vendor. You want to take your time and be sure you are getting the skillset you need. Rushing through this process may seem like it’s saving you time but having to change resources midway through a process is much more time consuming than just doing it right the first time.
Another thing that is essential when forming a project team is diversity. Some of you may think that’s a buzz word, but I mean it in its literal sense. Diversity of background, opinion and perspective makes for more robust collaboration and ultimately better products. My team does a lot of UX/UI design. Part of that involves making sure the interface is accessible for users with visual, auditory or ambulatory impairments. Having someone on your team with one or more of those experiences will provide valuable input. This applies to every possible type of diversity, culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It’s not always possible to have every single perspective represented on your team. But just be sure that if you don’t, you make an effort to include that perspective in some other way such as focus groups, user testing, or stakeholder interviews. The more diversity you have providing input, the better the quality of your product.
So now you have your team assembled. The best thing you can do at this point is simply identify obstacles and clear the road for your team. Don’t micromanage them. If you did your job right in forming the team, they don’t need you checking up on them every five minutes. However, this doesn’t mean that you should just go off and ignore them. The monitoring phase is incredibly important as a project manager and you should do just that…monitor. Look at key performance indicators and product output, determine where the team may be running into roadblocks. As the project manager, your primary role is to clear those roadblocks as quickly as possible and when you can’t clear them, communicate clearly to your project sponsor and other executives so it doesn’t blow back on your team. It’s also important to make sure that you aren’t becoming a roadblock yourself. Many project managers get hung up in monitoring and require their team to over communicate progress. You don’t need up-to-the-minute statuses on every single task. Key check-ins and milestones are important, but think about it this way: Would you rather your talented, high paid web developer spend their time coding, or updating your daily status report? Set reasonable communication expectations early and stick to them. Weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one meetings are a good way to do this. It’s a set time when your resource knows they need to report on their progress. But if you go this route, don’t bug them outside of those meetings. Save up your questions and ask them during the regularly scheduled time. On fast-moving projects, you can employee other agile methods like daily stand-up meetings or Kanban boards. But make sure the communication is appropriate to the team. Don’t overburden them with your processes.
And that’s it. It’s just that easy. Actually, no…it’s incredibly difficult. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface on how to build and maintain high-performing teams. For every guideline I’ve outlined above, there’s probably an exception. Also, each organization is slightly different. What works in my career, may not be as easy to accomplish at your company. As a project manager, you have to be flexible and ready to adapt when things don’t go quite as you expect. You have to remember that your human resources are also human beings. They have lives and things happen and you have to be sympathetic and understanding. That amazing developer you just hired may get a dream job offer in Hawaii and they just can’t turn it down. Those types of things are issues that you have to overcome, but don’t take them personally. Also, as we’ve learned this year, sometimes world events can impact your project. We can’t control the timing of a global pandemic, and so we have to be ready to deal with those events and how they impact our team. Many of us had experience working with distributed resources before COVID-19. For some, it was a hugely disruptive process to transition to remote work. But even in these strange and unusual times, our people are our most important resource. Building and maintaining productive teams remains one of the most important roles we have as project managers.
