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Project Managers and Trusting the Team Members
July 6, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: HR Management, Project Management Best Practices
Project Managers and Trusting the Team Members
By Phil Simon
While all PMs steer the ship, the best ones rely heavily on their crew members. To continue with the metaphor, a project may be the equivalent of smooth sailing at the beginning. Everyone wants the same thing: a successful implementation under budget and on schedule.
PMs should not focus on life at 30,000 feet. While they should not micromanage and unnecessarily involve themselves in many of the day-to-day issues, PMs who focus exclusively on high level objectives are remiss.
Rather, PMs need to do the following throughout the project:
- Listen to consultants when they bring issues to light
- Proactively approach consultants to ensure that individual objectives are on track
- Broach issues and their impacts to senior management as needed
Let’s look at an example of an issue on a project that requires action by the PM (Tony). During the testing phase of an implementation, consultants discover that the integrity of a client’s employee hire date (typically critical for HR and payroll systems) is suspect. Hire date drives items such as employee benefit eligibility, deductions, and vacation and sick time accrual rates. Until the date issue is resolved, the team cannot complete a key testing requirement: the employee data conversion.
Let’s be clear about Tony’s role here. He is not an HRIS expert and cannot be expected to know the impact of something as ostensibly trivial as employee hire date. What’s more, it is not his responsibility to ask about each field on the each conversion program. As will be discussed later, functional consultants must address these types of issues with Tony. He then must communicate this issue—and the potential solutions proposed by the team—to senior management as soon as possible. If he does not, then it may result in further delays.
How does the PM recognize such risks and determine what to do about them? Good PMs do not need to know answers to these questions much of the time. Rather, the best PMs solicit and rely upon consultants’ expertise. After all, they are the subject matter experts (SMEs) in their respective fields. In so doing, PMs minimize project risk. The PM is not, in all likelihood, a GL expert or a procurement guru. It is incumbent on PMs to rely on the people who are.
Phil Simon is a seasoned independent systems consultant and a contributor to different technology media outlets. He’s a dynamic public speaker and writer for hire focusing on topics related to organizations’ use of technologies. Phil is the author of the acclaimed book Why New Systems Fail. Phil can be reached via his professional website, Phil Simon Systems, and can be followed on twitter @philsimon.
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