The function and roles of the project management team

One way to provide the project managers and associated support staff in a business is to set up a project management team as part of the permanent organisational structure. The precise function of this team varies. Important functions of this team include:

• Recruiting sufficient project management resource to deliver prioritised projects.
• Providing access to additional project managers on a temporary or contract basis when the project workload is above normal.
• Delivering projects and programmes.
• Providing regular, reliable information on project status to provide up-to-date information and support decision making.
• Developing confidence in the organisation’s ability to deliver projects, and supporting the wider management community in making business commitments based on project delivery.
• Developing relevant project management tools, techniques and processes.
• Building appropriate project management infrastructure (see page 210).
• Acting as the role model for best practice delivery of projects.
• Developing and enhancing an organisation’s project management capability.
• Putting HR policies and performance management approaches in place to motivate project managers to continue to deliver successfully.

There are several roles that can exist within a project management team. The roles required depend upon the scale of the organisation, the type of projects it invests in, and the size of the project portfolio. The following table lists roles which may be part of this team. These are roles and not individuals. In some cases the role may be combined into part of a larger job, in other situations there may be several people with each of these roles.

Sizing and structuring a project management team

There are several ways to structure a project management team:

• The team can be centralised with all project managers in one team, or distributed across an organisation:
  • Centralised: favours development of specialist expertise and facilitates better control by portfolio management, but risks being bureaucratic and unresponsive to operational needs.
  • Decentralised: a good way to get rapid response to project needs and for project managers to develop content knowledge, but makes it harder to ensure consistent quality of project management, to perform portfolio management and ensure most efficient allocation of resources to highest-priority projects.

Often a combined model is best with a central team of project managers responsible for complex cross-functional endeavours, and project managers distributed in the line functions responsible for departmental projects.

• Centralised teams can be organised by:
  • Customer or functional group: mapping project managers to the organisation structure, e.g. having project managers for sales, operations and the corporate functions. This enables project managers to develop expertise in the area of the business they support.
  • By skill set, e.g. IT project managers, business change project managers, performance improvement project managers. This enables project managers to develop expertise in the type of projects they support.
  • By account manager and resource manager: have account managers facing each of the key stakeholders responsible for managing customer relationships and staffing projects. The team can have separate resource managers responsible for line managing project managers.

Sizing a project management team can be difficult as the number and scale of projects fluctuates. Three basic ways to size the project management team are:

• Sizing based on the peak workload: building a project management team that can fulfil the maximum workload. This provides great flexibility, but can be at significant cost.
• Sizing based on the average volume of projects: a steady resource level capable of handling the typical volume of projects, and using contract or temporary resource for workload above this peak.
• Do the reverse. Don’t size the project management team in relation to the number of projects – determine the volume of projects by the number of project managers. Use the project management team as a deliberate bottleneck, to limit the total number of projects started to those that this team can manage. Once all project managers are busy no further projects can be started until a project completes. This can be effective because:
  • There will always be a resource bottleneck in your organisation. By making it the project management team you can manage it, and you can ensure other teams do not become overloaded with work. A single resource bottleneck can be understood and controlled and the workload can be optimised.
  • It will happen anyway. If you try to staff to your peak project workload, you will find that project managers are always busy as there is a continuous appetite for projects.

Recruiting project managers

If you want to build a project management team you will have to recruit project managers. The steps in recruiting project managers are:

1. Start by being clear about the need – what specifically are you after?
   • How many project managers? (See page 200.)
   • What types? (See page 197.) Think through the range of projects you will have. Not every project needs a senior programme manager!
   • What skills and experience do the project managers need beyond project management? (See pages 82, 94, 183 and 197.) For example:
     • Industry knowledge
     • Technical skills
     • Methodology knowledge
     • Other context or specialist capabilities
     • General management skills.
   • What are the requirements for all employees, including cultural fit with your organisation? Discuss it with your HR department.
   • Determine type of employment (see page 203):
     • Permanent
     • Contract
     • Temporary.
2. Determine sources of staff:
   • Do staff need to have full experience or can they be trained and developed on the job?
   • Should staff be existing employees, or will external recruitment take place?
3. Develop selection criteria and competency framework based on point 1.
4. Advertise roles.
5. Interview candidates, and recruit according to the defined selection criteria.

General tips for selecting project managers:

• Regard accreditation as useful, especially in more junior staff. But look for proven delivery experience as essential.
• Remember you are not recruiting for any projects. You want staff who can deliver projects in your organisation with its specific characteristics.
• When interviewing candidates ask them to run through examples of projects they have managed. It’s easy to talk about the theory and how well things went, so to really test competence we must focus on talking about problem situations and how the candidates overcame them.
• Find out about their roles in past projects, not about the project or project team in general.
• Always go for quality candidates rather than the quantity of candidates you need.

You can choose to staff a project management team with employees or make use of contract or temporary staff. Factors to take into consideration when choosing between internal and contract project managers are listed in the following table:

Setting project management objectives

Project managers benefit from clear performance objectives, which annual appraisals can be based on. Suggested areas for consideration in setting project managers objectives:

• Project success objectives:
  • Delivery of projects to predicted time and budget, with consideration given to the complexity, risk and degree of change associated with the specific projects the project manager is responsible for.
  • Meeting project business case objectives.
  • Client satisfaction and expectations management, to be based on direct stakeholder feedback.
  • Fulfilling your project processes – e.g. compliance with regular reporting rules.
• Personal development:
  • Enhancement of knowledge of project or programme management, including achieving specific accreditation.
  • Enhancement of knowledge of related disciplines (e.g. change management, benefits management and business analysis).
  • Enhancement of knowledge required in role (e.g. technical or business skills).
• Cultural fit with organisation and team.
• Benefiting the wider organisation:
  • Development of organisation’s project management methods and standards.
  • Supporting the development and coaching of other project managers with less experience.
• Organisational link: project manager objectives should be linked to wider organisational performance goals, e.g. – company profitability, etc.

Developing project management skills

The skills of project managers can be developed through the following steps:

1. Start with an understanding that each person is unique, learns in an individual way and has individual learning needs.
2. Set development goals as part of the regular appraisal process, where goals are continuously refined and progress towards them is reviewed.
3. Link development of skills to a definition of ideal skills or competency framework at the level the project manager is operating at, the skills needed to work at a more senior level, and the wider needs of the organisation.
4. Use a variety of ways to develop skills, including:
   • Formal training, which may or may not end in accreditation. If you use accreditation, remember that the accreditation should not be an end in itself – it indicates a level of competence. It is only of value if a project manager’s performance improves once the accreditation is achieved.
   • Team meeting and informal discussion groups, sharing experience across projects. Teaching others is a great way to improve your own knowledge. Bring project managers together to review issues and problems and the ways they were overcome.
   • Self-research. There is a huge amount of literature and computer-based training available on project management.
   • Learning on the job. This does require a willingness to expose project managers to new situations and involve them constantly in different project management challenges.
   • Project reviews (see Chapter 9). Project reviews are a critical part of learning and skills development.
5. Manage the development process. Learning will occur whatever process is in place, but it will not be optimised unless it is managed. For example, if you want someone to learn on the job you have to put them into situations that provide the opportunity to develop the relevant knowledge.

Managing and motivating a project management team

For project managers to perform at their best they need to be managed and motivated to encourage a high performance. Project managers are more likely to be motivated if they work in an organisation which has:

• A culture that values the role of the project manager and sponsorship from one or more executives for the development of project management skills in the organisation.
• Clear role definitions for project managers.
• Performance metrics and general HR policies which assess performance and allow rewards in a way that is appropriate to project managers.
• A defined career path within the organisation, whether or not that is to continue to work in the project management family of jobs.
• A variety of interesting projects to work on.
• The availability of personal development. Formal training courses, pathways to accreditation, aligned with continuous professional development requirements of associations such as APM, mentoring, and exposure to varied projects.
• Realistic expectations of what can be achieved by project managers. It is good to have high expectations of project managers, but there should be realism as to what is and is not achievable within the environment and resources of a specific organisation.
• Rewards in line with market expectations for the type and scale of role performed.
• Good supporting processes and tools. (See page 210.)

The project management office

A project management office (PMO) is a valuable part of many project management teams. Project management offices have a variety of roles, and should be structured according to the situation. It may also be known as a programme management office, or simply a project office.

Typical responsibilities include one or more of the following:

• Administrative support to the project management team.
• Collecting and aggregating information from projects, such as weekly reports, time sheets and project resource requests.
• Developing and maintaining the project management infrastructure.
• Owning project management standards.
• Analysis of plans and other reports across projects to support cross-project issue, risk and dependency management.
• Document control, library management and knowledge management across the project management community.
• Provision of the specialist resources to be utilised when required, e.g.:
  • project planner
  • risk manager
  • benefits manager
  • portfolio manager.

To set up a PMO:

1. Determine who the customers of the PMO are. This could be one or more of:
   • management of project managers
   • project and programme managers
   • portfolio managers
   • other senior stakeholders across the organisation.
2. Determine needs of the customer(s).
3. Determine structure, size and location of PMO.
4. Gain budget and approval to set up PMO.
5. Recruit necessary staff to fulfil identified roles.
6. Put necessary tools and systems in place.

Choosing project management software and tools

There are many project management software tools. Many organisations buy software on a piecemeal basis, and end up with a hotchpotch of incompatible systems. Selecting software should be a managed process. Choosing, installing and achieving benefits from project management software is a project of moderate complexity in its own right.

The steps to select software are:

1. Determine who the stakeholders in the process of selecting software are and who is the decision maker or arbitrator. You need a small group of people who will work together to specify and select the software you need. You will also need a decision maker who has final say in what is selected and will arbitrate over any disputes.
2. Determine what you are trying to achieve. Are you buying tools to make your project managers more efficient, to provide better management information, or to overcome some project management weaknesses? (If it is the last, take care, software alone will not overcome that many problems.)
3. Determine what budget is available – this may effectively constrain your choices. Some of the sophisticated tools offer great functionality, but at a relatively high cost. At the other extreme are shareware packages.
4. Decide if you are primarily buying tools to fit your processes, or if you are willing to adapt your approach to fit the tools. Unless you develop the software yourself you are likely to have to amend your processes or approach when buying off-the-shelf packages.
5. Identify the ‘must-haves’. For example, does the software tool have to fit with your overall project management approach? Do you use critical path or critical chain? Do you use a standard methodology such as Prince 2 or MSP?
6. Inform yourself: research what tools are available. There are specialist project management tools, professional services automation tools, and many ERP systems have project-management-related components for activities like project budgeting.
7. Develop a specification. What functionality do you need? Consider:
   • Planning tools – single project.
   • Planning tools for multiple projects, and to integrate plans.
   • Resource management and time-sheet systems.
   • Communication tools.
   • Information sharing and databases.
   • Programme management tools.
   • Portfolio management tools.
8. Compare and select from the tools that are available.
   • Try to understand how the different tools work, e.g. most planning tools offer resource levelling, but how do they do it, and is it right for you?
   • If you need tools to integrate, make sure that they have the necessary interfaces and can share data in compatible formats.
   • If you have the time and the opportunity, try to speak to other users of the tools and understand how good they are in practice.
9. Develop an implementation plan.
10. Determine the actual costs, make a business case, prepare a budget and approve the plan. (The price of the software will only be a fraction of overall implementation costs.)
11. Install and amend working approach: this is a project with a change management element. All project managers and related staff will need education and training.
12. Review implementation and overcome outstanding problems.

Project management infrastructure

An organisation must develop an infrastructure to support project managers. This infrastructure must be sized and scoped according to the needs of the organisation. Useful components to consider are:

• Project or programme management standards, processes, role definitions and a competency framework.
• Software tools to support areas such as planning, resource management, portfolio management, along with reporting tools with common access.
• Document templates, e.g. project scoping documents, business cases, feasibility studies.
• Governance and portfolio management processes.
• Knowledge capture and learning support tools.
• Document sharing and team working tools.
• Project manager or programme manager role and competency definitions, and associated training materials.
• Reference guides such as standard risk checklists.
• A library of project management books or ebooks and related subjects to refer to.
• Customer engagement model. Defining when customers can, should or must come to you for project management resource, and how they engage you.