PMI PMP Project Management Professional – Introducing Project Resource Management Part 3

11. Acquiring Staff

So you’re the project manager, and you’ve got to get people on your team. You have to acquire people to get on your team. So you’re doing this process of acquiring staff. Well, for many project managers, this is an easy process because the team is preassigned the project charter or early in project planning. You may be assigned a group of people as your team, or maybe you work with the same people over and over and over. That’s just your team. For projects.

We also have to consider the availability, though, so what other projects are they on or what operational assignments do they have and that can affect when people can come work on your project? Is this part of a competitive contract? So you are doing projects for others, and so your team is built and they go in and do the work, and they have to get the work done because now they have other contracts to go on to. Is it required as part of the project charter, or is this an internal project?

When your team is assigned to you, this might be an opportunity to complete on the job training for a team member. So you get one individual or two or three people that are assigned to your team to learn, so they have some on the job training. If you don’t have people internally, you might turn to a vendor to do some contracting to get contracted labor. So when you deal with a procurement for staffing, your costs are likely to increase. So what is the most cost effective way to get those people onto your team? Resource leveling can affect your cost and procurement as well. The procurement may have a constraint that you could only use that individual 40 hours a week max, because above 40 the rate goes up.

So they could have resource leveling for those individuals that are contractors. When we talk about procurement for staffing, we also want to look at, well, are there internal resources? If there are internal resources, let’s use those people first, assuming they’re available. If those people can’t complete the work because they have other project assignments or operational duties, one of two things is going to happen. Your project is going to get delayed because you’re waiting for those resources, or you have to turn to procurement to hire people or to use contracted labor. So these are all considerations when it comes to procurement for staffing.

12. Working with Virtual Teams

I guarantee you, you’re going to have a question or more about virtual teams on your exam. So you’re going to be working with virtual teams for your exam, whether you do out in real life or not. So you need to know some characteristics and challenges of virtual teams. A virtual team is also known as a noncolocated team.

We’re not all in one spot if we’re on a virtual team, so we are non colocated. Thank you very much. Communication is paramount with virtual teams because we lose that face to face communication and people are dispersed. So we want to make certain we are effectively communicating with virtual teams. There are plenty of technological solutions, so you can do web meetings and audio conferences and using some collaborative software so that not only you, but the other project team members can communicate with one another. So obviously, virtual teams introduce some challenges.

A quick review of the headlines of virtual teams. You have, again, people from all over the world. People can work in different geographical areas all over the world, people can work from home and with different hours, mobility issues can still be included, and then travel expenses can be reduced. Okay, we have seen that over and over and over. Right? So you’ve got virtual teams down. So when you get those questions on your exam, you’ve got it. Repetition is the mother of learning. So now you know all about virtual team. All right, keep moving forward.

13. Developing the Project Team Up

Now that we have a project team, we want to take some action to develop the team. Team development means we are improving competencies. We want people to rely on one another and to have interaction and to be able to communicate with one another. So it enhances the overall project performance when people can rely and try trust and communicate with each other. So this is all part of developing the team.

Some goals of this process improve teamwork motivate employees, keep our turnover rate down and then improve project performance. Let’s look at the ETOs for developing the project team. Our inputs, your PM plan, specifically the resource management plan that we created earlier. Project documents like the lessons learned register, the project schedule, project team assignments, the resource calendar and the team charter, and of course EEF and OPA. Our tools and techniques colocation. We’re all in one spot and we can communicate very easily or virtual teams. Communication technology is a tool and technique. Obviously we’ll be using a lot of interpersonal and team skills. So conflict management, influencing people, motivating, negotiating and promoting team cohesiveness through team building activities. Recognition and rewards help people. They promote people. Like Hertzberg’s theory of motivation.

We’ll do some training, individual and team assessments and meetings. Our outputs of developing the team. We have team performance assessments, change request updates to our project management plans so the project documents, the lessons learned, project schedule, our team assignments, resource calendars and the team charter could be updated. Enterprise environmental factors and OPA could also be updated. When we talk about leading team development, we’re talking about soft skills here, some interpersonal skills. So being able to communicate and part of communication is listening. So having some active listening skills about being involved and really understanding what people are saying. Emotional intelligence to control your own emotion and how you respond and understanding where other people are coming from and their emotional state. Conflict resolution and influencing people.

We’re going to be training the team and doing some team building activities. Leading team development also includes those ground rules as part of our project charter and making sure that everyone is enforcing those and abiding by the ground rules. Colocation if we’re all in one central spot for this project, that’s sometimes called a tight matrix because we’re all colocated, sometimes in a matrix. We’re all on the same team, but we’re still dispersed.

A colocation or a type matrix means we have like a project war room or a project headquarters. Rewards and recognition. These are ways to reward people on our team for doing good work. So money is always a great reward. We want to do rewards and recognition throughout the project. Now, your organization may have rewards like apparel. You get a shirt with a little logo on it or a coffee mug and you can’t really do bonuses or money. Whatever the rewards though are, you want to make certain that you do that throughout the project, you don’t wait until the very end. People want to feel appreciated for their contribution to the project, so we want to acknowledge their work however we’re allowed to.

We do want to avoid, though, a zero sum reward. Zero sum reward means that only one person can win, like employee of the month. So employee of the month really does some negative things for your team. Other people who worked hard feel like they aren’t appreciated because they didn’t win, and then the person who did win may feel awkward around the project team members. So zero sum rewards aren’t good. We want to set up a rewards and recognition where anyone could win the reward. Some personal assessment tools here. Our attitudinal surveys and our structured interviews. Just a way of doing an assessment where people are, how they’re performing and how they are working, or what needs improvement on the project. These are all part of team performance assessments, where our goal is to improve skills. So constructive feedback, improving our team competency, keeping our turnover rate down, and then we want to promote team cohesiveness. All right, good job. I’ll see you in the next lecture.

14. Creating Team-Building activities

As a project manager. One of the favorite parts about managing a project is team building activities. Gives us an opportunity to facilitate team development, to get people to learn about each other and to come together as a team. And I think they’re fun. So some team building activities are often offsite site, like you might go bowling or put putt, or you go to some type of a seminar or conference that’s just for team building. There’s all sorts of companies out there that do these different events. So you find a way that you can do team building with or without a budget.

You also have to think about the time, though, you’re taking away from project work to invest in team building. So that’s a consideration. Typically this happens with larger projects where you have brand new teams, smaller projects. You may have just do some quick activities in your status meetings or team meetings. But it’s a way though, to get people to work together. Some good ideas for team building for your exam include training the project team. So you imagine you’re doing a type of work or working with a new material. You break up into smaller groups and you try the activities out and you mix things up. But it’s a training.

But you also get to learn about one another through the training. You do team involvement during planning, like that brainstorming and the mind mapping and affinity diagrams. So you get people involved and you encourage people to work with one another and talk with one another and bring people into that conversation. You also want to establish, though, the rules that when you have a disagreement, how do you do conflict management? How do you work out that problem? Offsite activities, even for planning like a workshop, is a good idea because it gets people out of the office, out of that normal environment where you might feel comfortable, or maybe you don’t feel comfortable. And it gives you a chance to do some team building and planning without other distractions. There are opportunities for quick team involvement activities.

Like I mentioned, there’s all sorts of little games or ice breakers you can find online to get people talking with one another and to have little puzzles or challenges that might only take five or ten minutes. So that’s a good idea to do, especially early in your project if you don’t have a budget or a whole lot of time. The goal, though, is to improve your interpersonal skills and to start creating relation chips so people can work together and count on each other. So think about team building. You’ll have some questions on that for your exam.

15. Naturally Developing Project Teams

For your exam, you’ll need to be able to recognize the concept of naturally developing project teams. This is the idea that teams move through a process and they identify leaders and followers. This is based on Bruce Tuckman’s Tuckman’s team development model, sometimes called Tuckman’s Ladder. It’s the five phases to team development.

So let’s look at that. Now. It’s the idea of forming Storming norming, performing and then adjourning. Forming happens when the team comes together. So they first meet, they just have some high-level formations. That very quick, polite meetings. Storming, though, is where people begin to position themselves to be a leader or a follower.

They feel very strongly about parts of the project, so you might have some hostility towards one another or even the project manager. Norming is where people accept their roles and people begin to follow and lead based on the outputs of Storming. And this is where they start to rely on one another and complete their project assignments. And then performing here at the pinnacle is where the team becomes cohesive, and they perform well, and they’re really getting the work done, and they work well together, and the focus is on getting things done, and they really start to enjoy each other and accomplish the goals of the project.

And then, of course, when the project is done, we have this fifth layer, which is kind of sad. It’s a journey because the team is temporary and they go on to other activities. So for your exam, you’ll want to know the characteristics of forming Storming, norming, performing, and adjourning that the team is disbanded. Okay, that’s Tuckman’s team development model. Let’s look at some general management skills. Now, with general management skills, things that you do as a project manager, you have leading that you lead the team. You’re worried about motivation and direction, aligning people, getting things done, but you’re motivating people to get things done. Obviously, communicating good. Project managers are generally good communicators, but remember that half of communication is listening.

Some general management skills that you have to have when it comes to team development, you have to negotiate. So you’re negotiating with functional management, with vendors, and with your project team members. So you’re negotiating for things like resources, time, cost, the assignments. So you might be negotiating for project team members on what work they can and can’t do. Problem solving. The project managers have to have the ability to problem solve. So as a project manager, you’re doing problem solving by passing the PMP exam. It’s showing your critical thinking skills influencing. That the project manager’s influence, that they used their influence to get things done. All right, keep moving forward. I’ll see you in the next lecture.