Chapter

12

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

All the great project management tools in the world will not deliver a successful IT project. It is people who complete the tasks that generate the deliverables that satisfy the user’s needs.

Project teams consist of human resources who are assigned to the project by design, desire, and default. They come more or less skilled and carry all the enthusiasm, reservations, and baggage of any group of people stepping into a new position. The successful IT project manager appreciates this situation and plans for it. She relates to the need to align project team members with tasks best suited to their skills, and she understand that each project team member has unique needs that mean the difference between a highly successful project and one that does not satisfy its objectives.

Q1 How does human resource management relate to IT projects?

IT project human resource management deals with all things related to the people involved in an IT project.

People come in a multitude of varieties and forms. That very diversity can be both a benefit and a challenge for the IT project manager. Human resource management, as a discipline, enables project managers to assess and match human resources with the skill sets required to successfully deliver a project. It provides the tools needed to ensure the people on the project team have the capability and capacity to complete their assigned tasks in a manner that will enhance the opportunity for project success.

For human resource management to provide any value to a project, the project manager must first be in a position to identify the project’s human resource requirements. The project’s work plan, listing all the known project activities, must be in good enough shape to identify the type of work that will be carried out over the course of the project’s schedule. From that list, the project manager can glean the skill sets necessary to complete the work as well as the potential number of team members required to get the work done in a reasonable period.

Once the skill sets have been identified, the project manager constructs a staffing management plan (Figure 12.1). This document identifies when each skill set is required over time and aligns those requirements with the available team member capabilities. The staff management plan enables the project manager to anticipate when specific project team members can be phased on or off the project. Software packages like Microsoft Project can provide excellent access to this information.

FIGURE 12.1 Sample Staffing Management Plan

Good human resource management goes beyond identifying the resources and skill sets needed to complete a project. It digs deeper into the human element of the project and recognizes the need to build teams that function well together. It facilitates the development of project team members and subject matter experts so they can efficiently and effectively contribute to the project’s success.

Seasoned IT project managers know that about 20 percent of all IT project time spent can be attributed to the technology used and developed for a project. The other 80 percent of project managers’ time will be spent managing the dynamics of their human resources. Human resource management provides the tools necessary for the IT project manager to deal with those issues effectively.

Q2 Who provides the business and technical resources for an IT project?

Under ideal circumstances, it is the project manager and the project’s technical lead who define the staffing needs for a project. Once they complete that task, they turn to the project sponsor to make the decision to commit and fund those resources for the project. From that perspective, the project sponsor is singularly responsible for securing the resources necessary to staff and complete an IT project.

Too often, project managers arrive on a job site to find that the project team members have already been assigned to the project. They find that the project sponsor, in his zeal for completing the project effectively, has assigned his best people to the team. Unfortunately, this is often done precipitously, without the benefit of a detailed skill set analysis. As a result, a gap might exist between the resources provided by the sponsor and the skill sets needed for the project. When this occurs, it is incumbent upon the project manager to build a clear case for filling the gap and deliver that message to the project sponsor. If the project manager lays out a sufficiently detailed case based on knowledge of the project, the project sponsor is likely to realize the mistake and fund the resources or training required to fill the gap.

Q3 What is a fat project team versus a lean project team?

Lean is a concept that stresses the need to realize maximum value and eliminate waste from any business process or project. A lean project team has on board at any time only those people who are integral to the work being completed by the project at that moment. All team members are productively engaged, with no one standing on the sidelines, killing time and wasting budget. Lean teams do not lack the full range of skill sets needed to complete the project’s tasks, but they do not carry excess either.

Fat teams include team members who are not fully engaged at all times. Fat teams possess skill sets that might be considered overkill at any point in time on the project. Fat teams waste the project’s budget by relying on overqualified resources and resources who are not fully engaged.

Consider a project team working on a custom software development project for a retail business. The project has completed project initiation and planning and is in the early stages of project execution. A software development vendor has been acquired and is working diligently without major complications. It will be another six months before testing can begin on the new software package.

The project team members listed in the first column of Figure 12.2 are assigned to the project fulltime. Considering the phase of the project and how things are going, an assessment of the project team might work out as shown in the other columns.

FIGURE 12.2 Sample Lean Team Analysis

The goal of any IT project manager should be to consume the minimum resources necessary to deliver the maximum possible value to the sponsoring organization. Fat teams should not be tolerated. People who are not engaged fully but take up space in a project office drag down the morale of those wrestling with the many intense and challenging issues that confront IT projects.

The project management lean rule of thumb: Never tolerate a fat team. Lean teams are agile and efficient, and they deliver successful projects.

Q4 How do you gain the support of nontechnical SMEs working on technical projects?

Successful IT projects require a blend of technical and nontechnical resources. Nontechnical subject matter experts (SMEs) provide critical information to the team about the business functions that are to be modeled or supported by the project’s technical solution. Getting the technical side of the project to interact and talk effectively with SMEs, and vice versa, can sometimes be a chore.

The good news is that the days of IT-centric projects have pretty much faded into the past. Few organizations beyond those engaged purely in IT research and development, where the goal is to develop new technology for its own sake, carry out projects that can be classified as uniquely and solely IT in nature. Seasoned technical resources associated with successful IT projects understand this and appreciate the need to communicate with nontechnical SMEs at the business level.

By assigning experienced technical resources who appreciate this point of a project, and who possess good communication skills, most communications issues between technical teams and nontechnical SMEs can be resolved. Those resources bridge the divide between tech-speak and the nontechnical lay point of view so that the business experts can have their say and the technical team can collect and utilize the business experts’ knowledge for the benefit of the project.

Q5 How do you hold team members accountable when you don’t share the same skill sets?

Some people in the IT project management field feel that the best project managers are those with an in-depth business background, who can bring their understanding of the business’s needs to the project. Others feel that for highly technical projects, it is the technical expertise that matters most, and effective project managers are those who have a deep technical background. It is doubtful that this question will be resolved anytime soon. Regardless of the answer, however, there is no easy way to hold project team members accountable for their work when the project manager is not intimate with each specific team member’s skill set.

In the first case, the business-oriented project manager might lack sufficient technical background to evaluate technical effort and deliverables with any degree of confidence. Even if he takes courses in software development, database modeling, network design, and so on to increase his understanding, the chances of his staying current in any of those fields while working as a project manager are slim. Technology moves ahead too fast, and the demands of IT project management are often too great for that to be ensured with any certainty.

Similarly, the technically-oriented IT project manager effectively leaves the technical disciplines behind when called upon to manage an IT project of any size. As a result, her specific technology background quickly becomes dated, and she finds herself in a position similar to that of the business-oriented project manager.

The only viable solution for this situation is for IT project managers of all kinds to partner up with senior project team members who have the necessary expertise to augment the project managers’ capabilities. The project managers can then delegate responsibility for team member evaluations to those persons.

If a project manager is unable to acquire the skill sets needed to fill his need for team oversight, another approach that can be used is independent validation and verification, or IV&V. IV&V teams are hired for brief periods to assess technical progress and completeness for IT projects. The teams can be configured with the necessary technical expertise to provide a thorough and objective assessment of technical team deliverables. Although this approach can be expensive, for highly complex projects where a good deal of money is on the line, the dispassionate perspective and potentially extensive repertoire of expertise of IV&V teams can provide a major benefit to the project manager and the project.