People & Projects
Key Focus | Key Process Steps | Finding the Right People
Key focus: How do you influence people to deliver the outputs necessary to achieve project success?
A difficult challenge facing project managers is the need to motivate diverse groups of people to work together to achieve the project outcomes. This means that developing 'soft' skills are critical for successful project management.
One of the most important things that the project manager does is to set the tone for the team. The project manager's role is to establish the project culture and enable it to develop in a positive way. Some simple ground rules that I always establish are:
- Courtesy to each other is mandatory
- Everyone has the right to raise & discuss any issues/problems/questions re the project
- Each team member has the right to convene a team meeting to raise an issue
- The only no-no is for someone to perceive a problem & not raise it with the team
Key Process Steps
- Set the behavioural ground rules for the team as early as possible
- Ask the team what other ground rules they think should be agreed
- Define communication protocols
- Ensure roles & responsibilities are clear
- Clearly articulate the reason for doing the project and its ultimate goal
Important Things to Do
- Keep notes on important discussions
- Don't let people issues fester - deal with them early before they escalate
Finding the Right People
One of the biggest challenges in projects is getting the right people with the right skills involved at the right time. The processes used to recruit people for permanent roles can be quite dangerous in relation to projects. On a project you do not often have three months to find out if the person is not working out. This means that skills and tools for checking skills and cultural fit are even more important for projects. Following are some useful recruitment practices for projects:
- role plays - get the candidate to role play a scenario that is appropriate for their role, e.g. get a business analyst to facilitate a short workshop
- technical skill tests - set a practical assessment, e.g. get a programmer to write some code or explain what is wrong with some code samples, get them to peer review some existing code
- samples of work - ask candidates to bring examples of their previous work, e.g. web designers should be able to show a portfolio of previous design work NB: ensure that you do not ask a candidate to reveal confidential information from a previous role
- behavioural questioning - this is based on the premise that previous behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour NB: bear in mind that dysfunctional environments tend to produce dysfunctional behaviour, so filter answers through this lens
- situational questioning - this is asking the candidate for how they would respond to hypothetical scenarios NB: bear in mind that the candidate may just say what they think you want to hear, you need to drill down on areas of interest and combine it with behavioural questions to filter
- cultural fit - this is one of the hardest things to assess via an interview, it is also difficult to assess cultural fit unless you have previously analysed your culture NB: the big risk here is that you use the concept of cultural fit to hire or not hire based on prejudice
- references - never simply accept written references, always ask to talk with the person providing the reference yourself, never just accept a recruitment agent's reference check either (they have a vested interest in you hiring the candidate)
