Project support team members on projects make it all happen by executing the tasks necessary to move a project through all its phases to successful closure and delivery. Typically, the number of team members is highest during project planning, stabilizes as the project progresses, and decreases as the project approaches delivery and closure. Full-time dedication to the team is also more prevalent during the planning and execution stages.
Human behavior is also a consideration in assigning staff to project support teams. Team members should not be assigned to a project solely on the basis of technical knowledge. It must be recognized that some people simply cannot work effectively in a team environment.
The team member position is where the actual day-to-day work of project planning, estimating, statusing, and analysis is done. This is where the organization accounts for plans and actual charges against time and dollars as the programmers write code, the installers install equipment, subcontractors provide their deliverables, etc. Within this level, more definitive project management roles — depending on the organization — can include:
Project controllers Project analysts Schedulers Planners
Business analysts
Knowledge management coordinator: sometimes formerly known as the “librarian,” this role has grown to include the maintenance of project records, standards, methods, and lessons learned that must be stored in a project database or repository. In a large organization, the maintenance of such a repository can develop into a full-time job. Once envisioned as a clerical task, the SPO librarian is now evolving into a sophisticated knowledge-manage- ment function and will become a fruitful source of benefits and value to the entire organization for historical data, successful prac- tices, and effective templates, with knowledge that was previously lost with changes in and transitions of personnel.
Estimators
104 Optimizing Human Capital
Systems analysts
Communications planners
Project administrators: back-office tasks, report generation, software support, calendars, etc.
Methodologists: best practice or process experts, they provide training, project oversight, quality assurance, and methodology development.
Resource manager: in organizations with significant project activity, the responsibility for resource management may become a full- time job. One major insurance company titles this role “The Project Manager Role Steward.” Individual project managers, rather than having to “beg, borrow, and steal” resources wherever they can find them, turn to the resource manager (RM) for assistance. The RM prioritizes resource requests, manages the “fit” of resource skills to project requirements, manage and balance scarce technical resources, forecast and aid in planning for acquisition of resource shortfalls, and secure assignment of key resources to projects according to the project’s relative rank on the organization’s pri- oritized project list.
Organizational development analysts: Another project human- resource management role that has been identified in some orga- nizations, the ODA “floats” among projects, identifying the human issues that often derail projects before they become a problem and working to resolve them. ODAs are a liaison between projects and the HR department. Is corporate HR a partner or the enemy? The relationship between IT organizations and the HR function has not always been harmonious: IT often views HR as slow, unresponsive, and out of touch with the realities of the IT labor market, while HR perceives IT as the group of people that upsets the organiza- tion’s compensation schedules. Establishing a boundary-spanning role such as the ODA can help alleviate some tensions with corporate HR, while making sure the project personnel’s needs are addressed.16
These roles are fully described in Appendix A.
Competency development has matured for project managers but there is still a lot of work to do for all the other job descriptions. Chapter 6 describes the “job families” into which we have sorted and cluster ed project roles and responsibilities in an effort to identify roles that can be combined, or that can serve as stepping stones in a development program.
However, it remains for organizations that have “best practice people” in all these roles to identify what the top performers’ behaviors might be.
In the meantime, we close this discussion of competence by reminding
Why Project Managers Fail … and How to Help Them Succeed 105
readers that, like any systematic analysis of human behavior, competency identification does not explain everything about human performance on projects. Sometimes, the most unlikely people do the most amazing things.
In the words of the philosopher, “These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence.’ Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”17
Next let us turn our attention to the hiring and selection practices for today’s knowledge workers and project team members.
Notes
1. Dennis Smith, in “Questioning Enterprise Project Management,” People on Projects, May 2004.
2. Gartner Group, Research Note, June 2002.
3. Frame, J.D., The New Project Management: Corporate Reengineering and Other Business Realities, Jossey-Bass, 1994.
4. Dennis Comninos and Anton Verwey, Business focused project manage- ment, Management Services, January 2002; see also R. Graham and R.
Englund, Creating an Environment for Successful Projects, Jossey-Bass 1997; and J. Nicholas, Managing Business & Engineering Projects — Con- cepts and Implementation, Prentice Hall, 1990.
5. Tom Mochal, Is project management all administration?, TechRepublic.com, posted Nov. 29, 2002. Accessed May 2004.
6. Christopher Sauer, Li Liu, and Kim Johnston, Where project managers are kings, Project Management Journal, December 2001.
7. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Friday,” 1849.
8. Frank Toney, The Superior Project Manager, Center for Business Practices, 2001.
9. Jimmie West, Building Project Manager Competency, white paper, accessed at http://www.pmsolutions.com/articles/pm_competency.htm, January 15, 2005.
10. David McClelland, The Achieving Society, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1961.
11. Harold Kerzner, In Search of Excellence in Project Management, John Wiley
& Sons, 1998.
12. Larry Hirschhorn, Manage polarities before they manage you, Research Technology Management, September 2001/October 2001.
13. Barry Johnson, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolv- able Problems, HRD Press, Amherst, 1992; and Gary Klein, Sources of Power, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
14. Robert Wourms, Attention Project Managers: Project Relief Is within Sight, unpublished article, May 2004. Also, “A New Way to look at PM Roles:
Where do you fit in?,” presentation, April 28, 2004, PMI–Great Lakes Chapter Symposium.
106 Optimizing Human Capital
15. Robert Wourms, ibid.
16. Ritu Agarwal and Thomas W. Ferratt, Enduring practices for managing IT professionals: assessing existing business practices to deter mine staff recruitment and retention capabilities, Communications of the ACM, Sep- tember 1, 2002.
17. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), German critic, philosopher, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, 1978.
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