Chapter 10

Managing the People

In This Chapter

People matter

Three key areas to watch out for

Motivation and performance

I’m a huge fan of practical project techniques and powerful methods that really help get the job done. However, although things like good methods are genuinely valuable, you’re probably every bit as aware as I am that without the right people these things aren’t going to make your project successful. Methods are like any tool. The tool is valuable and helpful for sure, but without the right pair of hands holding it, it isn’t going to get the job done well. In fact some tools in the wrong hands are downright dangerous; and I’m talking projects here, not 1200 watt power saws.

Even where you have got the right people, it’s all too easy to overlook their needs by focusing solely on the job in hand. In turn, failing to manage your staff well is almost bound to lead on to motivation and performance problems which, in turn, will affect the delivery of the job in hand. The one you were bothered about in the first place. And on that point about performance, don’t ever think that getting the best out of your team members is exploiting them. Most people on projects want to do a really good job. Just think of yourself here, and when you are the happiest and the most satisfied. Is it when you can see that you’re doing really well or when you know you’re not working at your best?

One kind of Project Manager focuses on the hard skills such as planning and financial control and says that she’s not ‘a people person’. Such a viewpoint simply isn’t workable for effective project management and your people are the most valuable asset you have.

The international standard for project quality management systems emphasises the importance of staff too. It says:

The quality and success of a project will depend on the participating personnel. Therefore, special attention should be given to the activities in the personnel-related processes.

ISO 10006:2003(E) 6.2 Personnel-related processes

The checklists in this chapter are to help you make sure that you are keeping up to speed on the staff management side of the project.

Three Areas to Watch

Along with some others Professor John Adair, a widely respected consultant and author on teams and team performance, has pointed out that there are three areas to watch for when managing people in teams, and that’s obviously very applicable to projects. The three areas interact and are often illustrated as a Venn diagram, like the one in Figure 10-1

Make sure that you balance your management across the three areas, and think about them when you do your project resourcing and you’re deciding who should do what.

• The project: You have to get the job done and the project delivered. That’s your primary objective, though it doesn’t mean you should neglect the other two areas.
• The team: You need to bear in mind the needs of the team. Unless the project circumstances are very unusual, you don’t have room for mavericks who will disrupt the team and drag the overall performance down.
• The individual: Your people matter, and wherever you can you should give them work that will interest them, challenge them and develop them. However, you must balance this area against the other two. It’s no good developing a member of your staff if the project then fails as a direct result.

Performance Levels

One of the sad things about buzzwords is that good concepts get forgotten when the buzzwords finally go out of fashion. One buzzword that used to be bandied about a lot was synergy, but now nobody ever seems to talk about it. That’s a shame because synergy is something extremely valuable. Individuals and teams can progress in the ways that they interact, and the more that they progress, the more effective they become. You may have experienced finally achieving synergy. I have, and the effect is mind-blowing. Here’s one variant of the progression, with four levels.

• Dependence: A team member can’t do much by themselves without asking lots of questions. She’s dependent on others to achieve anything. You may remember how it was for you when you first started a new job in a new organisation and everything was strange. You couldn’t even find your way to the stationery cupboard without asking someone.
• Independence: Now the team member knows what to do. She can work alone and achieve things within her own capacity and skill levels.
• Interdependence: This is the start of effective teamwork. Team members can help achieve things well beyond their own capabilities because of the mix of skills across a team. One person’s expertise in some areas is matched by the expertise of others in different areas. Together they also have much more capacity and can tackle bigger things.
• Synergy: Where team members just ‘click’ somehow and work extraordinarily well together, achieving considerably more than just their total work hours would indicate. Achieving synergy on a team has been compared to a fighter jet switching to afterburner and shooting forward with enormous power. Look out for people who work unusually well together, and team them up wherever you can.

At the start of the chapter I mentioned that getting the best performance isn’t exploiting people. That’s true when you look out for people who work exceptionally well together and achieve synergy. Although it’s exhausting working at that pace – so be sure that you give them space to wind down occasionally – it’s extremely enjoyable and rewarding.

The Motivation Checklist

Are your people well motivated? Highly motivated team members will help drive your project forwards, whilst demotivated staff can drag it down. Check out this list to help think through what you need to include in your management of the project in this key area.

• Their last project: Look at what the team, or individual, did last. If it was a failure you’ll need to build staff up and motivate them much more at the beginning of their work on this project than if the last thing they did was an outstanding success.
• Is the team a team?: If the team members haven’t worked together before, put in some effort to build them into a team from being just work colleagues. That includes motivating the team.
• Explain the benefit: Children will work at just about anything enthusiastically, with the possible exception of tidying up their bedrooms, but adults need a reason to get fully engaged. Explain what the project is about and why the contribution your staff will make is important; that’s motivating.
• Recognise the down side: Explain to your team members where work will be mundane and boring, but how it fits in and why it’s important. When your staff know that you know some stuff is boring it will make that work more bearable and team members will be more motivated to do it and do it well.
• Motivation points: Look for key points in the project where you can see that you’ll need to add in extra motivation. There’s more on this in the next checklist.
• Personal development: Check the distribution of activities within the project to ensure that, wherever possible, staff members have the opportunity to work on things that will stretch and develop them.
• Targeted development: Provided that team members are suitable for the work, give them tasks in areas where they’ve expressed an interest in working and extending their skills. When they see that you have a real interest in their development, they will be all the more dedicated to you and the project.
• ‘We not me’: The UK military makes frequent use of the phrase ‘we not me’. Those words emphasise that success is the something the team will achieve, not individuals putting their own wants first (such as the Project Manager claiming all of the credit for success). This ‘group’ identity is motivating and builds team spirit.

Motivation Points Checklist

You have to watch motivation levels throughout your project if you want your staff to perform well. However there are particular points where you can see in advance that you should step in to motivate people. Here are a few of them.

• On joining the project: When staff join the project it’s a key time for motivating them. In a lot of projects that will be a frequent process as new staff join at different points according to the work to be done.
• Starting a stage: A project meeting at the start of a new stage is a great time for encouraging staff and spelling out again the value of the project. This focus and re-energising can be powerful indeed.
• Flat times: In some projects there are times where a lot of work is being done but there isn’t too much to show for it yet in the way of product delivery. The flat times are points to visit the staff involved to give some encouragement and show your appreciation of the work they’re doing.
• On the completion of a significant task: When staff have finished a major task, perhaps the delivery of major product on the project, that’s a good time to express gratitude and show recognition for their work, the more so if they’ve really pulled out all the stops to achieve it.

Don’t undermine your recognition and thanks for a job well done with thoughtless, throw-away remarks about the next bit of work. ‘Well, you’ve done really well on that job so now I’ll be expecting equally high performance on the next one too.’ Comments like that just make people wish they hadn’t worked so hard and made a rod for their own backs. So focus on the completed job, say ‘Thank you’ and leave it at that.

• On leaving the project: It’s only fair to thank staff for a job well done. However, if you ‘motivate’ staff as they leave the project, just think how they’ll arrive on your next one.
• At the end of the project: If the project is a success, which I’m sure it will be, share that success. Make sure that organisational managers know who the team members were and try to get those managers involved in thanking people for their work. If it’s possible to reward your people then do so. If you can’t do that financially, with a bonus, you can at least have some sort of celebration to recognise the success. If you do have a celebration, don’t forget to invite those staff who were only involved in the early part of the project, contract staff and support staff.

Performance Problems Checklist

If your people are not performing on the project as well as you expected, find out why and work hard to correct it. You must monitor performance all the time to pick up on any problems. If you don’t you’ll find yourself missing targets and the longer the performance has been below par, the longer it will take to catch up. In fact you may never catch up because the future performance will have to be much better than planned in order to make up the lost ground.

Here are a number of things to check if the staff performance levels are lower than you expected.

• Complexity and difficulty: Are the project products proving much harder to build than anticipated? That might mean you’ll need more people and perhaps with more skills and experience.
• Lack of skill: Have you got the wrong team members? Perhaps this is an instance where you were given the staff who happened to be available rather than who were suitable for the project. If so work with renewed energy to change that position; and now you have some performance data to back up your case.
• Demotivation: You know yourself that you work well below your capacity when you are demotivated. Check if this is a factor and revise your pattern of visiting and encouragement if it is. See the previous checklist on Motivation Points.
• Excessive specification change: Review the amount of change taking place in the project. If it’s excessive and the goalposts are constantly moving, productivity and delivery will suffer.
• Staff change: Look at the amount of staff change. If it is more than you’d expected, that may explain the productivity loss for two reasons. First, replacement staff take time to get up to normal speed, so you have a loss of productivity until they do. Second, the team dynamic is disrupted. That can be incredibly damaging in a high performance team.
• Multi-tasking: Where team members are working on other projects as well as yours, check the degree of multi-tasking. If they’re trying to do too many things at once, all of the work will slow up dramatically. A five-day job will take six weeks if someone is working the same amount on four other projects at the same time. And no, the six weeks is not an arithmetical error. You know yourself that if you put a job down and pick it up again a week later, it takes you a while to get back up to speed, and you make more mistakes too.
• Communications and documentation: Check whether the documentation and communications are sensible. Are people spending too much time reading and writing emails instead of making a quick phone call? Are they bogged down in unnecessary paperwork when they could be moving the project forward?
• Personal use of social media: Are younger team members in particular (though not just younger ones) spending a lot of time keeping in touch with friends on social media or with sending and receiving texts? You may need to set down some rules here, for example that personal stuff be left for lunchtimes. One survey has found that a significant number of staff now spend up to an hour of working time each day on personal use of social media.
• Support: Ensure that you have sufficient support in place, especially for junior team members. If staff feel unsure of the work, don’t know what to do and don’t have anyone they can ask about it, they’ll slow up.
• Relationships and disputes: Check for friction within the team. If people aren’t working well together, even to the point of not being on speaking terms, then productivity is obviously going to suffer. Try to resolve any disputes and if that doesn’t work, change the team membership. See the first checklist in this chapter on The Three Areas to Watch.
• Bad management: Check how your Team Leaders are managing their teams. If they are bullying staff for example (regrettably, it happens) then productivity will suffer as people do the minimum possible in the hope of avoiding criticism on what they have done. Move in very quickly on this one for the sake of the staff as well as the project, but be sure to gather facts first to support your actions. Also be extremely careful to follow your organisational rules for disciplinary action.
• Environment: Check the working environment of your teams. Poor working environments are known to bring down performance. If this is the problem, get the team moved to somewhere better or at least take steps to improve the surroundings.
• Disturbance: Check to see whether team members are being disturbed. Disturbance might be because of hustle and bustle in a busy open plan office where they can’t concentrate, or because they’re repeatedly called on to do other work alongside their project work, such as operational support.
• Equipment: check that the teams have the equipment and tools they need to perform well.
• Concern at the future: make sure that your team members know what they’ll be doing after the project – succession planning is important. If team members think that they’ll be made redundant at the end of the project because their job in their home department has now been permanently filled by someone else, they’re going to be focusing more on finding a new job than getting your project finished.

Motivator and Hygiene Checklist

My favourite management guru has to be Fred Herzberg, sadly no longer with us. He put forward a Two Factor Theory of motivators and what he called hygiene factors. In brief, his theory (which incidentally has never been disputed) is that things like good pay and company cars don’t motivate people. He was misquoted as meaning that you don’t have to pay people well, but he didn’t say that. He said that if you neglect these hygiene factors you’ll reduce performance below the norm. He called the norm the Potter line where people potter along doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. However the hygiene factors won’t boost performance above the Potter Line; for that you need motivators.

Have a look through this checklist of Fred Herzberg’s ‘motivators’ and see how you can build them into your project to maximise motivation and commitment. To validate the list, think how important these things are to you in your own work.

• Achievement: To produce something worthwhile and do it well.
• Recognition: You’ve worked hard and someone notices what you’ve done.
• Meaningful interesting work: Doing work that’s deadly boring, and of which, what’s more, you can’t see the point anyway, is inherently demotivating and a recipe for poor performance. So strive for the opposite and design the Work Packages (work assignments) keeping in mind those who will do the work. But see the advice in the Motivation checklist earlier in this chapter because not all project work can be interesting.
• Increased responsibility: People respond to responsibility and rise to the occasion. That’s reasonable responsibility, though. Don’t put someone in charge of something on the project where they’re in over their head or they’ll just freeze.
• Growth and advancement: Offer the opportunity to develop, alongside delivering the project.

If you want to know more about Fred Herzberg, search on the internet for ‘Jumping for the Jelly Beans’. The material is a bit dated in terms of presentation quality, but entirely current in terms of content.

Stage Briefing Checklist

Use this checklist to help prepare your staff briefing at the beginning of each stage. The briefing is to encourage and motivate staff, and also to be sure that they’re clear on project controls and communications.

• Welcome: If new staff are joining the project to help with the work of the stage, this is a natural point to publicly welcome them.
• The work of the stage: An explanation of what’s involved in the stage and how it fits into the project. This will be less significant where a single team is working right through and the staff are already fully aware of all the project work.
• Key risks: List and explain the key risks affecting the work in the stage ahead. Some may be ongoing risks while others may be localised to this stage alone.
• Risk responsibility: Include a reminder that everyone in the project should be watching out for risks. Check that everyone knows how to report risk-related information (usually a Project Memo).
• Quality: Keep in mind the ISO emphasis to maintain ‘a culture of quality’ in the project, and emphasise the need for everyone to take quality seriously. However taking quality seriously means delivering at the specified level, not ‘gold plating’ with excessive and unnecessary levels of quality.
• Quality openness: Particularly where you have junior team members, encourage staff to be open about errors found in product tests. If testing never found errors, there wouldn’t be any need for testing. The important thing is to find and correct errors, not cover them up so that they just cause bigger problems later.

It’s a learned behaviour to be grateful when someone finds an error in your work. Junior team members in particular tend to be too proud of their work. If someone finds an error then an inexperienced person will try to rush the rest of the test or review through before anyone else finds something wrong with their precious product.

• Time recording: Explain why you need time recording on project activities and emphasise that team members should complete time sheets accurately. Explain how you need the information for project management and control and it’s not to ‘snoop’ on staff or criticise performance.
• Problem reporting: To remind staff that there will be problems. If anyone encounters one that they can’t deal with then there’s no shame in reporting it. Remind the teams of ‘we not me’ and if someone hits a problem everyone will work together constructively to help resolve it.

Supplier Staff Checklist

If you’ll have supplier teams working on your project, don’t forget them or imagine that they don’t need anything. If they’re going to work effectively and help you deliver, they need support too. The supplier staff are on your side; they’re not the enemy. Have a look at this checklist to help think what you need to do to help them perform well.

• Induction: Supplier staff may be technically expert, but they won’t necessarily understand your organisation. To help prevent misunderstandings and mistakes, include some induction briefing. That may mean bringing supplier staff on site for a day or so, perhaps a couple of weeks ahead of the project work.
• Support: Supplier staff will have questions about the project; they can’t work in a vacuum. Unless the supplier staff are working alongside your own people, have someone available to answer questions, and be sure that everyone knows who that person is.
• Project controls: Make sure that your supplier staff understand the project controls that you’ll be using. Your own staff may be very familiar with the controls because of past projects, but supplier staff work in many different organisations with many different ways of doing things.
• Cut them some slack: Supplier teams that are well established may have their own way of working that’s every bit as effective as yours, just different. Don’t make them work your way just for the sake of it. It will lead to misunderstandings and slow things down. When setting up the controls (notably the Work Packages or work assignments) discriminate between what’s important, in order to fit in with the rest of the project, and what isn’t.
• Facilities: The working environment affects performance; we know that. So don’t put supplier staff in the broom cupboard under the stairs then.
• Inclusion: Supplier staff are part of your project, so include them in any team events during the project. You might need to get financial approval to spend organisational funds on supplier staff as well as your own organisational staff but it’s worth it. The last thing you want is a ‘them and us’ divide in your project.
• Handover: The trouble with suppliers and consultants is that they walk out of the door at the end of the job and take a lot of knowledge with them. Think if you need to record any useful information before they leave, or even build in a handover briefing for the staff who will take on responsibility for the operational use of project products.

Don’t overlook supplier support. In his 100 Rules for NASA Project Managers Jerry Madden observes that NASA staff

… should be making every effort possible to make sure the contractor gets a high score (i.e. be on schedule and produce good work). Contractors don’t fail, NASA does and that is why one must be proactive in support.

To repeat the point from just before the last checklist, remember that the supplier staff are not the enemy. They’re part of your project and if they succeed then that will help ensure that you do too.