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Lost in Projects - Integrated Project Management
May 22, 2012 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Integration Management
Lost in Projects - Integrated Project Management
By James Clements
Lost in projects is a dilemma many individuals face in project based organizations and can be a killer to both motivation and career development for the individual and employee retention for the organization. Organizations must institute an integrated project management approach to ensure this does not occur.
Lost in projects is where individuals move from project to project and fall through the cracks of every day organizational performance management and career development systems.
So how does this play out? Let’s take a Project Engineer as an example:
- Employed directly into a project, just misses performance appraisals time, so no performance objectives set, no responsible manager, project is too busy for this kind of stuff.
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11 months later he moves to a new project. There is no performance appraisal automatically generated by the system for him, his new Project Manager hastily throws one together, gives him a set of objectives for his project.
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Project finishes 9 months later, Project Engineer is moved back to his Functional home, the Engineering Department.
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Performance appraisal time again, this time he’s on the list, but the performance objectives the project set him don’t match what he’s doing now.
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Functional Manager gives him a generic appraisal because his last Project Manager has left the company and there is no first hand feedback available. He gets a generic salary increase/bonus based on this appraisal, if in fact he gets anything at all.
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A month later he moves to a new project, falls off the Functional Manager’s radar.
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11 months later the cycle starts again, providing he hasn’t already left the company.
So, extreme case to demonstrate the point, but in this scenario our Project Engineer has just spent 3 years in the company, has had no performance appraisal that actually assessed his performance against the job he was undertaking at the time, has had no career management formal or in-formal and most importantly no performance based review, salary or position adjustment.
At this point he either leaves the company or is seriously aggravated and un-motivated because his efforts count for nothing. At this point he’s about to turn into the guy in the project team that’s going to drag the whole team down, you probably don’t want him around your other employee’s anyway.
So, what do you do about this situation.
- Consider establishing a PMO if you have large project volume. One of the PMO’s many roles will be to manage the careers of mobile project people to ensure this doesn’t occur.
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Project Manager’s to become more aware of this problem, develop relationships with Functional Manager’s so that they co-manage project peoples performance.
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Institute a process whereby both project and function specific performance objectives are set and outcomes recorded, particularly when projects disband. This should be part of the project closure process.
James Clements, MBA, MPD has been managing, directing, winning projects and developing project management processes in diverse industries around the world for the past 20 years. You can contact James via his website here and you can read more from him on his blog.
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