PMI PMP Project Management Professional – Introducing Project Resource Management Part 2

6. Relating to Organizational Theories

For your exam, you’ll need to know some organizational theories. So let’s take a look at some of these theories now, and I think these are kind of interesting. The first one is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you’ve ever had a Psych 101 course, you’ve likely seen Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow says that we have five needs which drove derive our reason to work. The first one is a physiological need that we need water and food and air. So just those basics to be alive. So we work to purchase those things. Safety needs is that we have a need to be safe and to feel secure. So we want a safe working environment that we’re not put in danger through our project work. Social needs is we have a need to be social. We need friends and to interact with others.

So a social need at work, there’s a social aspect. You become friends with your colleagues or your peers. The esteem needs mean that you take pride in your work and you want to feel valued, and you want to feel that the work you do contributes. And then at the pinnacle here, we have self actualization. And this is like you’re calling that what you’re doing is the purpose for you being alive. And I know all of you feel self actualized as project managers. Well, Maslow tells us you can’t really satisfy the need above until the need below is taken care of. So if you are really hungry and really thirsty, you probably aren’t interested in social needs right now.

That you need those basic needs. You need to have food and water and to breathe. If you feel at work, it’s dangerous and you feel like you might get injured, you’re not really interested in feeling esteem in what you’re doing. So the needs below have to be satisfied before you can move up this hierarchy. Then we have Hirschberg’s theory of motivation. Hirsberg tells us that there are demotivators and motivators. Demotivators are the negative things that causes performance to suffer. And so things like poor pay or constant pressure or stress or company policies that hold you back. Motivators are the opposite things that promote performance. So you have variety in your work that you aren’t bored with the work you’re doing. You have challenges, that you have a sense of achievement and recognition.

In this model of hertzburg’s Theory of Motivation, we have hygiene agents and promoting agents. Hygiene agents are things that are just the norm part of the employer employee relationship. That I get a paycheck and some benefits and a safe working environment, a relationship with my manager and my peers, that that’s all part of just showing up for work. If I don’t have my hygiene agents, the promoting or motivators aren’t really going to help me do my job. So I have to get a paycheck. If I don’t get paid, I’m not really interested in a variety of work.

So I have to have my hygiene agents met first. The absence of a hygiene agent is actually a demotivator. That work will go down, performance will suffer. So motivators and demotivators. That’s hertzburg’s theory of motivation. McGregor’s X and Y is a management perspective towards employees. Management that has an X people perspective sees the team as a group of people that have to be micromanaged. They’re lazy, you can’t trust them, and they avoid work. So a very negative connotation. Now, a Y people perspective is just the opposite. They see the team as self led and motivated and capable, and they’re excited to do the work. The truth is, as a manager, there are some people that are X and some people that are Y.

So X is bad and Y is good. That’s McGregor’s theory of X and Y. McClellan’s theory of needs is based on David McClellan’s acquired needs theory, sometimes called the three need theory. McLellan posits that over time, our needs change and they’re acquired by our life experiences. And the three needs that we have in McLellan are achievement, affiliation, and power. Now, achievement means we want to excel, that we set goals, we want to excel. So they’re more ambitious, driven. So getting a certification, for example, if that’s your number one driving reason, could be achievement or taking on a project that’s high profile, it’s going to have a big influence. You want that.

Excuse me? You want that. So our experiences are shaped by our life, and our life experiences determine our needs. So we have achievement, affiliation, and power. Achievement, we seek to excel. We have ambition, like getting a new certification or taking on a high profile project that we hunger for, that we want that opportunity, affiliation. We just want harmonious relationships and acceptance among our peers and our colleagues. And then power is where we have personal power or institutional power. So personal power, you think of an out of control government employee or an official institutional is like, we want to be the vice president or you want to be the CEO. And that’s what you’re working towards to move up that ladder.

So over time, your needs can change. So you think about someone who’s going to retire next year. They probably don’t have a lot of achievement or power needs at this point. They’re more about just affiliation and getting along and maybe coaching and mentoring in that last year before they go off and retire. How you determine which need is really driving you or an individual is you complete what’s called a Thematic Apperception Test. So it’s a theme, these little story problems, and then you answer questions. And so how you answer the questions can be interpreted to determine which need is driving the individual. A few other theories that you should be familiar with.

We have weechi’s theory. Z. Not auchi. It’s Wi Chi’s theory, Z. Weechi says that the Japanese management style is a familial style and participatory, and that people want to be involved and feel valued and that we have this concept of lifelong employment. Broom’s expectancy theory tells us that people behave based on what they believe their behavior will bring them. So if you are working for a manager that’s very strict and very curt and very abrupt, you behave a certain way around that manager. If you’re working for a manager that’s more laid back and they’re more conversational and easy going, you’re going to behave differently around that person as well. If you have kids, you’ve experienced the expectancy theory.

And I don’t mean that like you’re having a baby. I mean that the expectancy theory, how they behave around you is different than how they hang around grandma. I know my mom did not treat me the way that she treated my son. There’s no way. So it’s totally different. And so my son acted differently around me and his mother than he did around grandma. Just like an employee may act differently with different managers, now the expectancy people, the expectancy theory also means that an individual, if you promise them a bonus and they want it, they’re going to work towards that bonus, they’re going to work towards that reward.

And then if you get to the end of the project and the reward is a $10 gift card to the coffee shop, they’re probably not very excited. The next time you tell them, you get this deadline done, you meet this deadline, I’ve got a bonus for you. Because they’re thinking, great, I work hard. I work all these weekends, and I’m going to get $10 worth of coffee. So the expectancy theory tells us that people behave based on what they believe their behavior will bring them. Another theory here is called the halo effect. The halo effect is where we have one positive attribute about an individual, and that’s the filter that we see them through.

So, for example, we have Jane, and she is a great software developer. So Jane would naturally be a great project manager over a software development project. It’s two different skill sets. Jane may not even be interested in being a project manager. There’s no evidence of her project management abilities. Her evidence is in software development. So the halo effect is a false perception around individuals that we make a determination or a judgment by. All right, good job. Know these theories for your exam. You’ll probably see one or two questions on them. Keep moving forward. I’ll see you in the next lecture.

7. Creating the Resource Management Plan

Now let’s talk about creating the resource management plan. This is our output of plan resource management. So when we go about creating the resource management plan, we’re identifying the people and the resources that our project will need. So we identify people from our resource pool, our organization. Then we look at, well, where do we have skills gill gaps, where do we need other roles that we don’t have internally? So do we need to do acquisition, we need to hire people, do we need to train existing staff? Or do we go out to procurement and we get a contractor to come in and be part of our team? Resource requirements will include the physical resources, not just people. So we have to think about the physical resources we’ll need and how do we acquire those.

When we go about acquiring resources, we’re going to be working with HR and physical resources, we’re going to be dealing with procurement. Assuming we have to purchase materials, you might, with physical resources, be talking about facilities. So you have to schedule facilities or schedule equipment. Talent management is the process of can we train people and do development and increase our talent and our abilities? And then we have personnel development. Same idea that we want to develop our personnel so they can participate in the project.

We might have risk identification here with skill gaps or someone who’s just recently learned a new skill so that could introduce a risk if there’s a lot of responsibilities and someone who doesn’t have a deep understanding of what the project work is. Release planning. We think about an agile we do release planning and then at the end of that project, with release planning of the product, what happens to the project team? Same thing in predictive that we get to the end of the project or the end of a phase and we don’t need those resources anymore. How do we release those back into the organization? And then we have seller resources. We want to make certain that when we hire or we purchase that the resources are correct and they’re delivered on time because that can affect our project. Obviously when we’re dealing with a vendor, we’re going to be dealing with procurement. So this will mean contracts. We’ll talk about contracts in detail in chapter twelve of the Pinbox.

When we talk about procurement, when we go to procure, we have to deal with our enterprise environmental factors. How do you procure in your organization? It’s probably different than how I procure in mine or other people that are in this course procure in their organization. So the EEF is unique to your company, to your organization. You might be dealing with employee groups or unions, these collective bargaining agreements and they could be a constraint on the project. Now, I don’t mean the people.

The people are not constraints, but the contracts are constraints and the rules are constraints because they limit your options and then I might have additional reporting relationships, especially in a matrix environment where people come from all over the organization to be on this project. So now I have to coordinate with all of these different functional managers as to when I need these people to do work on the project. Let’s look at the resource management plan.

It’s a pretty big plan. A lot of things to know here. I identify the HR and the physical resources. I want to find out how will we acquire resources for the project, how will people be brought onto and then released from the project? How will you account for employees time? So you have to keep track of the time that they work on the project. I want to only use employees as needed and when needed. There’s nothing more frustrating than to be on a project and you’re just sitting around waiting for an assignment. So I want to make certain that I’m scheduling and communicating that schedule and making sure that people are utilized when they are needed. And then I want to have timetables for these team members. So this gets back to our resource calendar and our project calendar. So when will I be utilizing these resources? So resource calendars are needed. When will we use these people on this project? When will we have work for them to do?

Also, in the resource management plan, training needs are defined. So if there’s a skill gap and we have to do some development, then I want to do training. I want to do everything that I can to remove or to reduce worries about employment. This is very important. If you are in a project central organization, recall that a project central organization is where your team comes together for the duration of this project and they don’t work on anything else but this project. And let’s say this project is going to last for 18 months. The closer we get to the end of the project, there may be a lot of anxiety in the project team because they’re wondering, well, what am I going to do after this project?

Am I going to be employed? Is there going to be another project for me to go to? So I have to acknowledge that and work towards that. I have to comply with government regulations, union contracts, and any policies. Then I have to think about procurement. You have to deal with procurement. So this ties into chapter twelve in the Pembach with procurement management. But how will you procure physical resources and human resources? So hiring or working with a vendor to get people on your team, what’s the lead time like? And then vendor fulfillment, what’s their lead time to actually deliver the materials that you need? One of the terms that we saw as an output of planning resource management was a team charter. A team charter is a document that the project team and the project manager all create together.

This charter defines the values, what’s valuable to the team to work together? What about the communication guidelines and decision making abilities and the process among the team and the project manager when we have conflicts? What’s the conflict resolution process for the team? What are the meeting guidelines? What are the team agreements that we make with one another as far as doing the work and communicating? And then what are the ground rules? Once we establish the charter, once we establish the ground rules, it’s the responsibility of everyone on the team to enforce the charter, to enforce the ground rules, not just the project manager. So this is the project team charter. All right, great job. I’ll see you in the next lecture.

8. Estimating Activity Resources

As we’re planning, we’ll need to identify the resources that we need in order to do the project work. There’s a couple of different terms that we need to know when we think about acquiring resources or getting people onto our team. The first one is effortdriven activities and fixed duration activities. Effort driven activities means the more effort, the more labor that we put on a task, the sooner that activity can get done. A fixed duration activity is immune to adding more labor in order to finish faster. So an effort driven activity could be like painting all those hotel rooms. The more people I can add to the task, the sooner I can get done. A fixed duration may be testing or you have a piece of equipment that could only create 1000 widgets an hour.

Just because I add more people to that piece of equipment to stand around and watch it doesn’t mean it will create more units per hour. So that’s a fixed duration. These are important to note because we think about crashing the project, adding more labor. I can only crash effort driven activities, fixed duration activities like testing or waiting for things to cure, that’s a fixed duration won’t go faster because more people are assigned to it. Effort obviously can affect the completion date on effort driven activities. In all of this, we have to consider the law of diminishing returns. Recall that the law of diminishing returns tells us you can’t exponentially add labor. You can’t keep adding labor and adding labor to reduce the duration of a task to a smaller and smaller amount. At some point the people that you add are going to get in each other’s way or they’re not going to have the same approach to the work. So the law diminishing returns tells us that you can’t keep adding more and more labor to bring down the total duration. At some point you hit the yield.

The yield also tells us the value or the profitability. By adding more and more labor, at some point you’re going to pay more for the labor than what the thing you’re creating is worth. So the law of diminishing returns comes into play with activity resource needs. Let’s talk about the ETOs for estimating activity resources. Our inputs. Here we have our project management plan, specifically our resource management plan, our scope baseline project documents, the activity attributes, the activity list, the assumption log cost estimates, the resource calendar and the risk register. And of course you have your enterprise environmental factors and OPA tools and techniques. Expert judgment first, then bottom up estimating analogous estimating parametric estimating. We’ve seen those already when it came to estimating time and cost. Data analysis, looking for alternatives, the senior engineer and the junior engineer. A big piece of equipment, a little piece of equipment as far as throughput.

And then we think about the PMIs. Microsoft project, primavera base camp slack, whatever you’re using. And then of course meetings is a tool and technique. Our output of estimating activity resources. You’ll have your resource requirements, the basis of those estimates. You might have a resource breakdown structure, project updates to our documents, activity attributes, the assumption log, and the lessons learned register. So the resource availability here, remember the resource calendar. When people are available, you might have to negotiate with other managers to get resources that you need at particular times. So negotiate for resources comes into play. If you can’t get the resource that you need, you might have to move that activity to elsewhere in your project network diagram with the assumption that there’s not hard logic tied to it. So you may not be able to move it because it has to happen in a particular order.

So that one is not always a feasible solution. So in those instances you might have to delay the activity or even delay the whole project so you can get the resource that you need. Or can you do alternative analysis and find other choices? So I may have to go to a vendor or I may have to work with a junior engineer. It might take longer, but at least they’re working on it. So what are the alternative resources that you could use and then examining the project calendars. We’ve mentioned these a couple of times, right? You have the project calendar and the resource calendar. Project calendar is when your project work takes place.

The resource calendar will be when resources are available to work on your project. A resource breakdown structure is like the work breakdown structure. It visualizes the utilization of resources. It helps you identify resource constraints where one resource may be used at multiple places all at the same time. That’s not feasible. And then it helps you to identify where you have a resource need or a gap. So this is an example of a resource breakdown structure. So we have our project in these different components. There in orange and then in gray are the different resources.

So this is just kind of generic, but you’d have the resource identification as to the particular people or resources your project needs in these different parts of your project. So from this you could say, well, I need this particular role and we don’t have one or this piece of equipment we have to procure. But it shows where you’re using resources in the project. So that’s a resource breakdown structure. Great job, I’ll see you in the next lecture.

9. Acquiring Resources

Let’s talk about acquiring resources for your project. So how do you get human resources and the physical resources on your project? What opas can you use? Forms and templates and processes and procedures? What about enterprise environmental factors? What you are required to follow a particular process or you require to choose from these vendors, or you must have this type of a role on your project team. So those are all things to consider when it comes to acquiring resources.

Let’s check out the edo’s for this process. Our inputs, the project management plan, specifically the resource management plan, the procurement management plan and the cost baseline. Our project documents are an input, as is the project schedule. And within the schedule we’re talking about resource calendars and the resource requirements that we’ve identified. And then you’ll use the stakeholder register because those are people that you’re going to reach out to the stakeholders to get the resources you need. And of course, as I just mentioned, EEF and OPA tools and techniques here some decision making, multi criteria decision analysis for choosing the right resource, interpersonal and team skills. So you may have to do some negotiation with management reassignment here’s, your project team and good luck.

Or you’re dealing with virtual teams, the outputs of acquiring resources and there’s a lot you have your physical resource assignment and your project team assignments. The resource calendars, you may have change requests because you want to change the particular materials because they’re not available. Project management plan updates like the resource management plan and your cost baseline. Typically if a change request here, your costs are going to change.

Project document updates so, lessons learned, the schedule, your resource breakdown structure and resource requirements you might update the risk register and the stakeholder register, enterprise environmental factor updates and OPA updates. Acquiring the Project Team so some things to consider. Some interpersonal skills may be negotiation and influence. So you have to work with other project managers to get the people that you want on your project team. The wrong resource will affect the project success. So if you need someone with a particular skill set and you have to use someone that doesn’t have that skill set or their competency is not to the same depth that can affect the success of the project.

Alternate resources or alternative analysis allows us to consider things like the cost, the competency, what training is needed, the legal, regulatory or mandatory requirements for our team. So those are all things we have to consider when it comes to acquiring the project team. When we think about acquiring the team pre assignment often happens. You have a team already assembled and that’s the team that you get and you work with those people over and over and over. Negotiation is when you’re building your team and you negotiate for the resources that you want. And then acquisition is your hiring or working with a vendor to get the people that you want on your team. We’ve seen virtual teams a couple of times already in our course.

The idea of virtual teams, we can work from people from all over the world. People can work from home; they don’t have to travel. People can have different schedules, people with mobility handicaps are included, and we can reduce our travel expenses. So virtual team is not a surprise here. You’ve seen this already a couple of different times. When it comes to choosing our team, we think about multi criteria decision analysis, so all the different factors that could affect our decision as to who will come on the team. We don’t want to get caught in analysis paralysis, where we want to study every factor before we make a decision that just slows down the whole process.

But we want to make good decisions. So we consider things like availability, the cost of resources, their experience, what are their abilities, what knowledge do they bring, what’s their skill, what’s their attitude and international factors. So these are all things that can go into your decision making about acquiring people to be on your team. Once we’ve done this process, we have our staff assignments, we have our physical resources acquired, we have resource calendars created. We may have updates to our project management plan and our project documents. So there you go. That’s the process of team acquisition or resource acquisition. Great job. I’ll see you in the next lecture.

10. Negotiating for Resources

In the last lecture, we talked about negotiating for resources. So when we go to negotiate for resources, some things that we have to know going into that negotiation what’s their availability? So we want to work with functional managers to determine when people can work on your team. What are the costs, do you think, about the cost? Assuming that you have to account for the direct cost? A direct cost means that the cost of that labor is attributed to your project budget. Many project managers have an indirect cost where the labor is not an expense to the project, it’s an expense for the organization, so it’s outside of the project.

And then what’s their ability, their competency and proficiency? Some other factors to consider what about their experience with this technology or the type of work you’re doing? What knowledge and skills do they bring? So remember, we have that explicit and tacit knowledge, where explicit is very easy directions, where tacit is more shaped by experience. What’s their attitude? You want people excited to work on your project and then international factors. You’re dealing with people from all over the world and different cultures and time zones and even languages that can affect your project team and communication. Some challenges for resource negotiation. So you’re talking with managers. You have to think about your structure.

So are you allowed to go talk to those managers? Or do you have to flow through your manager to get resources in another group? What’s functional manager’s role as far as your structure? Remember those matrix structures and who has the authority? What about other project managers that will use that resource? So we get in a matrix structure.

An individual might be on several projects at once. So you may have to coordinate with other project managers when you’ll be utilizing that resource. And then operational schedules, when will the work take place? And then when are those individuals allowed to work on your project? Because they may have regular day to day assignments they have to do too.

You do not want unnecessary project team roles. You only want people on your team when they can be utilized. You don’t want people sitting idle on your team. People on your team, they need to be working. You don’t have assignments for them at this time, then you’ve got a problem because someone’s paying for that person to be idle. And that’s pretty boring for the individual as well, and their attitude is going to tank. All right, so those are all some considerations for resource negotiation.