Staffing and Team Building

profileR534
Chapter5.ppt
Home>Computer Science homework help>Staffing and Team Building

Management Functions

Chapter 5

Definitions

  • Measuring: determining through formal and informal reports the degree to which progress toward objectives is being made.
  • Evaluating: determining cause of and possible ways to act on significant deviations from planned performance.
  • Correcting: taking control action to correct an unfavorable trend or to take advantage of an unusually favorable trend.

Directing

  • Staffing: seeing that a qualified person is selected for each position.
  • Training: teaching individuals and groups how to fulfill their duties and responsibilities.
  • Supervising: giving others day-to-day instruction, guidance, and discipline as required so that they can fulfill their duties and responsibilities.
  • Delegating: assigning work, responsibility, and authority so others can make maximum utilization of their abilities.

Directing (Continued)

  • Motivating: encouraging others to perform by fulfilling or appealing to their needs.
  • Counseling: holding private discussion with another about how he might do better work, solve a personal problem, or realize his ambitions.
  • Coordinating: seeing that activities are carried out in relation to their importance and with a minimum of conflict.

Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs

SELF-ACTUALIZATION

SELF-ESTEEM

SOCIAL / BELONGING

SAFETY

PHYSIOLOGICAL

Motivating

  • A feeling of pride or satisfaction for one’s ego
  • Security of opportunity
  • Security of approval
  • Security of advancement, if possible
  • Security of promotion, if possible
  • Security of recognition
  • A means for doing a better job, not a means to keep a job

Professional Needs

  • Interesting and challenging work
  • Professionally stimulating work environment
  • Professional growth
  • Overall leadership (ability to lead)
  • Tangible rewards
  • Technical expertise (within the team)
  • Management assistance in problem-solving
  • Clearly defined objectives

Professional Needs (continued)

  • Proper management control
  • Job security
  • Senior management support
  • Good interpersonal relations
  • Proper planning
  • Clear role definition
  • Open communications
  • A minimum of changes

Providing Security

  • Letting people know why they are where they are
  • Making individuals feel that they belong where they are
  • Placing individuals in positions for which they are properly trained
  • Letting employees know how their efforts fit into the big picture

Motivation

  • Adopt a positive attitude
  • Do not criticize management
  • Do not make promises that cannot be kept
  • Circulate customer reports
  • Give each person the attention he requires

Motivation

  • Giving assignments that provide challenges
  • Clearly defining performance expectations
  • Giving proper criticism as well as credit
  • Giving honest appraisals
  • Providing a good working atmosphere
  • Developing a team attitude
  • Providing a proper direction (even if

Theory Y)

Non-financial Awards/Recognition

With non-financial awards, employees may receive cash-equivalent items, but not cash-in-hand.

Types Of Project Authority

DE JURE

DE FACTO

OR LEGAL

OR IMPLIED

AUTHORITY

AUTHORITY

AUTHORITY

CHARTER

PROJECT

Power/Authority Problems

  • Poorly documented or no formal authority
  • Power and authority perceived incorrectly
  • Dual accountability of personnel
  • Two bosses (who often disagree)
  • The project organization encouraging individualism
  • Subordinate relationships stronger than peer or superior relationships
  • Shifting of personnel loyalties from vertical to horizontal lines

Power/Authority Problems (Continued)

  • Group decision making based the strongest group
  • Ability to influence or administer rewards and punishment
  • Sharing resources among several projects

Negotiations

  • Negotiations should take place at the lowest level of interaction.
  • Definition of the problem must be the first priority:

The issue

The impact

The alternative

The recommendations

  • Higher-level authority should be used if, and only if, agreement cannot be reached.

Responsibility Matrix

  • General management responsibility
  • Operations management responsibility
  • Specialized responsibility
  • Who must be consulted
  • Who may be consulted
  • Who must be notified
  • Who must approve

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (An Example)

Raw Material Procurement

Prepare bill of materials

Contact vendors

Visit vendors

Prepare purchase orders

Authorize expenditures

Place purchase orders

Inspect raw materials

Quality control testing

Update inventory file

Prepare inventory report

Withdraw Materials

Project Manager

Project Office

Team Member

Department
Manager

Project Sponsor

LEGEND

General Management responsibility

Specialized Responsibility

Must be consulted

May be consulted

Must be notified

Must approve

Definitions

  • Authority is the right of an individual to make the necessary decisions required to achieve his objectives or responsibilities.
  • Responsibility is the assignment for completion of a specific event or activity.
  • Accountability is the acceptance of success or failure.

Delegation Factors

  • The maturity of the project management function
  • The size, nature, and business base of the company
  • The size and nature of the project
  • The life cycle of the project
  • The capabilities of management at all levels

Types of Authority

  • The focal position for information
  • Conflict between the project manager and functional managers
  • Influence to cut across functional and organizational lines
  • Participation in major management and technical decisions
  • Collaboration in staffing the project
  • Control over allocation and expenditure of funds

Types of Authority (Continued)

  • Selection of subcontractors
  • Rights in resolving conflicts
  • Voice in maintaining integrity of the project team
  • Establishment of project plans
  • Providing a cost-effective information system for control
  • Providing leadership in preparing operational requirements

Types of Authority (Continued)

  • Maintaining prime customer liaison and contact
  • Promoting technological and managerial improvements
  • Establishment of a project organization for the duration of the project
  • Cutting red tape

Types of Power

  • Legal authority: the ability to gain support because project personnel perceive the project manager as being officially empowered to issue orders.
  • Reward power: the ability to gain support because project personnel perceive the project manager as capable of directly or indirectly dispensing valued organizational rewards (i.e., salary, promotion, bonus, future work assignments).

Types of Power (Continued)

  • Penalty power: the ability to gain support because the project personnel perceive the project manager as capable of directly or indirectly dispensing penalties that they wish to avoid. Penalty power usually derives from the same source as reward power, with one being a necessary condition for the other.

Types of Power (Continued)

  • Expert power: the ability to gain support because personnel perceive the project manager as possessing special knowledge or expertise (that functional personnel consider as important).
  • Referent power: the ability to gain support because project personnel feel personally attracted to the project manager or his project.

Leadership Factors

  • The person leading
  • The people being led
  • The situation (i.e., the project environment or problem.)

Situational Leadership

Employee Problems

  • The pyramidal structure
  • Superior-subordinate relationships
  • Departmentalization
  • Scalar chain of command
  • Power and authority
  • Planning goals and objectives
  • Decision making
  • Reward and punishment
  • Span of control

Management Pitfalls

  • Lack of self-control (knowing oneself)
  • Activity traps
  • Managing versus doing
  • People versus task skills
  • Ineffective communications
  • Time management
  • Management bottlenecks

Communications Defined

  • Effective project communication is needed to ensure that we get the right information to the right person at the right time using the right media and the right format and in a cost-effective manner.

Communications Responsibility

  • The project manager must know:

What kind of message to send

To whom to send the message

How to translate the message into a language that all can understand

Communications

  • An exchange of information
  • An act or instance of transmitting information
  • A verbal or written message
  • A technique for expressing ideas effectively
  • A process by which meanings are exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols

Types of Communication

  • Written formal
  • Written informal
  • Oral formal
  • Oral informal (preferred by project managers)

Communication Channels

UPWARD

COMMUNICATION

TO

MANAGEMENT

TO FRIENDS, SOCIAL GROUP

LATERAL COMMUNICATION

AND BOTH FORMAL AND

INFORMAL ORGANIZATIONS

LATERAL COMMUNI-

CATION TO PEERS,

FUNCTIONAL GROUPS

AND CUSTOMERS

LATERAL COMMUNICATION

TO ASSOCIATES AND

THE PROJECT OFFICE

PROJECT

MANAGER

Customer-Contractor Communication

Informal

Informal

Formal

Customer

Contractor

Sponsor

Sponsor

Employees

Employees

Project

Project

Manager

Manager

Total Communication Process

SOURCE

RECEIVER

ENCODER

DECODER

MESSAGE

PERSONALITY

SCREEN

SCREEN

PERCEPTION

FEEDBACK

PERSONALITY

SCREEN

PERCEPTION

SCREEN

REGION OF EXPERIENCE FOR SOURCE

REGION OF EXPERIENCE FOR RECEIVER

Encoding Barriers

  • Communication goals
  • Communication skills
  • Frame of reference
  • Sender credibility
  • Needs
  • Personality and interests
  • Interpersonal sensitivity
  • Attitude, emotion, and self-interest

Encoding Barriers (Continued)

  • Position and status
  • Assumptions (about receivers)
  • Existing relationships with receivers

Decoding Barriers

  • Evaluative tendency
  • Preconceived ideas
  • Communication skills
  • Frame of reference
  • Needs
  • Personality and interest
  • Attitudes, emotion, and self-interest
  • Position and status

Decoding Barriers (Continued)

  • Assumptions about sender
  • Existing relationship with sender
  • Lack of responsive feedback
  • Selective listening

Understanding Barriers

  • Listening skills
  • Culture
  • Intelligence
  • Knowledge base
  • Semantics
  • Situational consideration
  • Emotional status
  • Authority or position
  • Common sense

Internal Factors

  • Power games
  • Withholding information
  • Management by memo
  • Reactive emotional behavior
  • Mixed messages
  • Indirect communications
  • Stereotyping
  • Transmitting partial information
  • Blocking or selective perception

External Factors

  • The business environment
  • The political environment
  • The economic climate
  • Regulatory agencies
  • The technical state-of-the-art

Environmental Factors

  • Logistics/geographic separation
  • Personal contact requirements
  • Group meetings
  • Telephone
  • Correspondence (frequency and quantity)
  • Electronic mail

Ambiguity

  • Ambiguity causes us to hear what we want to hear.
  • Ambiguity causes us to hear what the group wants.
  • Ambiguity causes us to relate to past experiences without being discriminatory.

Functional Applications

  • Providing project direction

Decision making

Authorizing work

Directing activities

Negotiation

Reporting (including briefings)

  • Attending meetings
  • Overall project management
  • Marketing and selling

Functional Applications (Continued)

  • Public relations
  • Records management

Minutes

Memos / letters / newsletters

Reports

Specifications

Contract documents

Perhaps as much as 90 percent or more of the time the project manager spends in providing project direction involves some form of communications.

Meetings

  • Meetings can be classified according to their frequency of occurrence:

The daily meeting where people work together on the same project with a common objective and reach decisions informally by general agreement.

The weekly or monthly project meeting where members work on different but parallel projects and where there is a certain competitive element and greater likelihood that the chairmen will make the final decision by himself/herself.

Meetings (Continued)

The irregular, occasional, or “special project” meeting, composed of people whose normal work does not bring them into contact and whose work has little or no relationship to the others.

Written media

  • Individually oriented media: These include letters, memos, and reports.
  • Legally oriented media: These include contracts, agreements, proposals, policies, directives, guidelines, and procedures.
  • Organizationally oriented media: These include manuals, forms, and brochures.

Six Steps

  • Think through what you wish to accomplish.
  • Determine the way you will communicate.
  • Appeal to the interest of those affected.
  • Give playback on ways others communicate to you.
  • Get playback on what you communicate.
  • Test effectiveness through reliance on others to carry out your interactions.

Barriers

  • Receiver hearing what he wants to hear. This results from people doing the same job so long that they no longer listen.
  • Sender and receiver having different perceptions. This is vitally important in interpreting contractual requirements, statements of work, and proposal information requests.
  • Receiver evaluating the source before accepting the communications.

Barriers

  • Receiver ignoring conflicting information and doing as he pleases.
  • Words meaning different things to different people.
  • Communicators ignoring nonverbal cues.
  • Receiver being emotionally upset.

Conclusions

  • Don’t assume that the message you sent will be received in the form you sent it.
  • The swiftest and most effective communications take place among people with common points of view. The manager who fosters good relationships with his associates will have little difficulty in communicating with them.
  • Communications must be established early in the project.

Communication Styles

  • Authoritarian: Gives expectations and specific guidance
  • Promotional: Cultivates team spirit
  • Facilitating: Gives guidance as required, but not interfering
  • Conciliatory: Friendly and agreeable while building a compatible team
  • Judicial: Uses sound judgment

Communication Styles

  • Ethical: Honest, fair and by the book
  • Secretive: Not open or outgoing
  • Disruptive: Breaks apart unity of group
  • Intimidating: “Tough guy,” and can lower morale
  • Combative: Eager to fight or be disagreeable

(Continued)

Administrative Closure

  • Records Management

Minutes

Memos

Newsletters

Reports

Specification changes

Contractual documentation

Administrative Closure

  • Project Archives

Project records

Update historical databases

Financial records

Security of critical information

LAWS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT

  • No major project is ever completed on time, within budget, with the same staff that started it.
  • Projects progress quickly until they become 90% complete: then they remain 90% complete forever.
  • If project content is allowed to change freely, the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress.
  • No system is ever completely debugged: attempts to debug a system inevitably introduce new bugs that are even harder to detect.
  • Project teams detest reporting progress because it vividly demonstrates their lack of progress.

PROVERBS

  • You cannot produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
  • The same work under the same conditions will be estimated differently by ten different estimators or by one estimator at ten different times.
  • The most valuable and least used word in a project manager’s vocabulary is “NO”.
  • You can con a sucker into committing to an unreasonable deadline, but you can’t bully him into meeting it.
  • The more ridiculous the deadline, the more it costs to try to meet it.

  • Too few people on a project can’t solve the problems - too many create more problems than they can solve.
  • You can freeze the user’s specs but he won’t stop expecting.
  • Frozen specs and the abominable snowman are alike: they are both myths and they both melt when sufficient heat is applied.
  • The conditions attached to a promise are forgotten and the promise is remembered.

PROVERBS (continued)

  • A user will tell you anything you ask about - nothing more.
  • Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient one is the only correct one.
  • What is not one paper has not been said.
  • Parkinson and Murphy are both alive and well and form part of your project.

PROVERBS (continued)