Human Resources Management

The following table addresses the importance of leadership, staffing, organization, and team building.

 
Priority
Area
4
Small project team; previous working relationships; cohesive team culture; experienced in project areas.
3
Medium sized team; divergent organizational groups; available skills and staffing; familiar with project culture.
2
Large, diverse project team; potential scarcity of skills and staffing; unfamiliar and divergent cultures.
1
Very large project team; wide experience requirements; scarce skills; differing organizational goals and project cultures.
Project Leadership
Communicate goals clearly; manage the project team as a group; foster ownership of plans and tasks; build relationships through communication and consideration; set high standards and lead by example.
Establish clear goals and roles; institutionalize practices of communications and good will; identify and resolve issues and conflicts; delegate to workgroups, build ownership and establish success metrics.
Ensure management commitment and disciplined approach; emphasize communications, baselines, metrics, and issue resolution; address need for outside and inside PM roles.
Select PM with self-discipline, coaching, communications, political savvy, technical and project experience; provide active sponsorship and senior management oversight.
Staffing Plan
Identify resource requirements, assign staff, and get them applied to the project work; decide what before who; monitor adequacy of staffing and report status to project sponsor.
Consider project tasks and organization first, then plan staff to fill requirements; build staff plan from Gantt resource estimates; delegate ownership of staffing plan; involve team in planning process.
Perform structured analysis of skill types and quantities; use resource scheduling estimates; plot graph of staffing requirements versus actuals and report status periodically.
Determine skill levels from work package estimates; identify experience requirements and gap analysis; use metrics as critical success factor; plan hiring and training to meet deltas.
Project Organization
Identify roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships; discuss plans to cope with organizational disjoints; encourage informal communications.
Publish and maintain organization chart; address conflicting goals and loyalities; promote team ownership of integrated solutions.
Consider matrix organization with strong PM functions and administrative support; document plan to surmount structural short-comings; use cross-functional teams to help concurrencies.
Document project roles and responsibilities; map organizational breakdown structure (OBS) to WBS and communications plan; use projectized or strong matrix structure.
Project Team Building
Take responsibility for leading the team; develop strategies and plans to build group cohesion; work with team to identify nneded skills and behaviors to enhance team performance.
Conduct team sessions to improve communications and facilitate issue identification and resolution; build team identity; solicit and address team concerns.
Identify criteria for successful team performance; articulate strategy and plan for achieving team goals; develop metrics and monitor status; invest to improve team dynamics and cohesiveness.
Articulate a team building vision, objectives, and strategy; provide goals, supportive resources and tools, and meaningful measures of success; develop team ownership of this process.
Version 1.2
© Copyright 1997, James R. Chapman

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