Project Management in Practice

Sixth Edition

Chapter 2

The Manager, the

Organization,
and the Team

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 Introduction
• Project manager usually selected after project is
selected
• It is job of project manager to make sure that the
project is properly planned, implemented, and
completed
• Project manager then recruits qualified people for
the project
• Learning project tools and techniques is easy,
succeeding as a project manager is hard

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 The Project Manager’s Roles
• Facilitator
– Facilitator versus supervisor
• Must ensure that those working on project have the appropriate
knowledge, resources, and time to accomplish their
responsibilities
– Systems approach
• Must understand how everything impacts the overall project
• Communicator
– Must communicate effectively with the various
stakeholders of the project

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 Communication Paths for a Project
Manager

Figure 2-1
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 Different Views of Stakeholders
• Traditional view suggests alternative stakeholders
define success and failure differently
• Others don’t see satisfying alternative stakeholder
needs as a zero-sum game
– Seek to align the goals of all stakeholders with the
purpose of the project
• If we look for trade-offs we will find them!
– If we look for synergies we may find them too

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 Identifying and Analyzing
Stakeholders
• Expert judgment of PM and project to team
helpful in identifying stakeholders
• Stakeholder register created to maintain key
information about stakeholders
• Stakeholder issue log should also be
maintained to catalog issues that arise and
how they were resoloved

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Example Power-Interest Grid
(Figure 2-2)

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 Example Commitment
Assessment Matrix (Figure 2-3)

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 Managing Stakeholder
Engagement
• Obtaining and confirming stakeholders’
commitment to the project’s success at the
appropriate stages in the project
• Communicating with stakeholders to manage their
expectations
• Proactively addressing stakeholder concerns
before they become major issues
• Resolving issues in a timely fashion once they
have been identified
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 Virtual Project Manager
• More and more often, project teams are
geographically dispersed
– Often referred to as “virtual projects
– Much of the communication is conducted via
email, through websites, by telephone, or video
conferencing
• To succeed, communication between
project manager and project team must be
frequent, open, and two-way
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 Responsibility to Senior
Management
• Must keep senior management up to date on
the state of the project
• Particularly important to keep management
informed of any problems
– Or any likely to affect the project in the future
• Never let the boss be surprised

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 Responsibility to the Client
• The project manager is also responsible to the
client
• Clients often want changes to the project
– Cost, schedule, scope change
– Cost of changes often exceed client’s expectations
• Project manager must be certain the client
understands the impact of the changes on the
project’s goals of delivery time, cost, and scope

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 Responsibility to Project Team
• Facilitate the work of the team
• Help the team succeed
• Serve as advisor, counselor, confessor, and
interested friend

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 The Project Manager’s
Responsibilities to the Project
• Acquiring resources
– It is the project manager’s responsibility to ensure the
project has the appropriate level of resources
– This is especially difficult with human resources
• Fighting fires and obstacles
– Early obstacles linked to need for resources
– Later fires associated with technical problems, supplier
problems, and client problems

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 The Project Manager’s
Responsibilities to the Project Continued
• Leadership and making trade-offs
– Trade-offs are between cost, schedule, and scope
– Scope is usually the most important
– Another type of trade-off occurs between projects
• Negotiation, conflict resolution, and persuasion
– Cannot meet these responsibilities without being a
skilled negotiator and resolver of conflict
– Success depends on the project manager’s skill at
persuading others to accept the project
• As well as changes in its methods and scope once it has been
accepted

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 Skills of Persuasion
• Effective persuaders must be credible to those
they are trying to persuade
• Effective persuaders must find goals held in
common with those being persuaded
• Effective persuaders must use “vivid” language
and compelling evidence
• Effective persuaders must connect with the
emotions of those they are trying to persuade

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 Critical Dimension of
Leadership: EQ
• Research suggest that EQ is single best predictor
of job performance
• EQ is ability to harness emotions to achieve
positive outcomes
• Foundational skills
– Self-awareness
– Self-management
– Social awareness
– Relationship management
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 Strategies for Dealing with
Conflict

Figure 2-4
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 Selection of a Project Manager
• Credibility
1. Technical credibility
2. Administrative credibility
• Sensitivity to political issues and interpersonal
conflict
• Leadership, style, and ethics
– Only project manager has the view of the entire
project to provide the necessary leadership
– Most effective overall style is participative
– Another aspect of leadership is a strong sense of ethics
• Ability to handle stress
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Six Signs of Excessive Stress in the
Workplace
1. Inability to switch-off work issues
2. Disturbed sleep
3. Lack of pleasure in non-work-related
leisure activities
4. Difficulty concentrating or making
decisions
5. Tendency to anger quickly
6. Lack of energy
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Ways to Keep Stress Under Control

1. Keep a journal
2. Prioritize all tasks
3. Give yourself time to unwind
4. Engage in after-work physical activities
5. Improve your physical surroundings
6. Become aware of the control you have

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 Growing Importance of
Multicultural Projects
• Project managers have to be aware of
cultural differences between counties
• Common practice in one country may be
illegal in another
• Discovering another culture’s ethical
standards is difficult
• Project managers have to be trained to the
highest ethical standards

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 Project Management As A
Profession
• Project management is a demanding job
• Mastering the use of project management
tools requires specialized knowledge
• Project Management Institute (PMI) is a
project-oriented organization with more
than 447,000 members worldwide
• PMI publishes The Project Management
Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)

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Career Path for the Project Manager
• Starts with work (not as manager) on a
small project
• Moves on to larger projects
• Moves on to a project engineer or deputy
project manager
• Project manager for a small project
• Moves on to larger projects
• May manage a “megaproject”
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 Fitting Projects into the Parent
Organization
• Project managers rarely have any influence
over the interface between the project and
the parent organization
• This is a matter of company policy
• As such, it is decided by senior
management
• However, it has a major impact on the
project manger

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 Pure Project Organization

Figure 2-5
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 Pure Project Advantages
• Effective and efficient for large projects
• Resources available as needed
• Broad range of specialists
• Short lines of communication

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 Pure Project Disadvantages
• Expensive for small projects
• Specialists may have limited technological
depth
• May require high levels of duplication for
certain specialties
• The project begins to take on a life of its
own

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 Functional Project Organization

Figure 2-6
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 Functional Project Advantages
• Has immediate, direct, and complete contact
with the most important technologies it may
need
• Fractional resource problem is minimized
• Projectitis will be minimal

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Functional Project Disadvantages
• Lines of communication outside functional
department can be slow
• Technological breadth can be missing
• Project rarely given high priority

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 Matrix Project Organization

Figure 2-7
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 Matrix Project Advantages
• Flexibility in way it can interface with
parent organization
• Strong focus on the project itself
• Contact with functional groups minimizes
projectitis
• Ability to manage fundamental trade-offs
across several projects

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 Matrix Project Disadvantages
• Violation of the unity of command principle
– Project workers are often faced with conflicting
orders from the PM and the functional manager
• The organization’s full set of projects must
be carefully monitored by the program
manager
• Complexity of managing the organization’s
full set of projects intra-team conflict

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 Mixed Organizational Systems

Figure 2-8
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The Project Management Office and
Project Maturity
• Another way of solving some of the problems of
choosing an organizational form for projects
• Parent organization can set up a project
management office (PMO) like a functional group
– It can handle the budgeting, scheduling, reporting,
scope, compliance with corporate governance, and risk
management activities
– The functional units supply the technical work
• The PMO often serves as a repository for project
documents and histories

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 The Project Team
1. They must be technically competent
2. Senior members of the project team must
be politically sensitive
3. Members of the project team need a strong
problem orientation
4. Team members need a strong goal
orientation
5. Project workers need high self-esteem
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 Team Development: Tuckman
Ladder
• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing

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 Matrix Team Problems
• The smaller the project, the more likely it is to be
organized as a weak (functional) matrix
• As a result:
– Project manager may have no direct reports
– Ability to communicate directly with team members
will be critical
– Important to maintain good morale … since team
loyalty may be limited
• A project “war room” may be helpful

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Matrix Project Teams and Unusually
Difficult to Manage
• Such teams are seen by their members to be
temporary
– So, the tendency to develop team loyalty is limited
• The technical specialists working on the teams are
often perfectionists
– Have a strong desire to keep tinkering with a project
deliverable that already meets requirements
• Project teams can cause scope creep
• High levels of conflict

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 Intrateam Conflicts
• Matrix projects have lots of conflict
• Sources of conflict differs when the project is in
different stages of its life cycle
• Four common threads for reducing or preventing
these conflicts
1. Careful project planning
2. Participative management
3. Interaction and negotiation between the project
manager and the functional manager
4. Communication between the project manager and all
project stakeholders

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 Integration Management
• Independent and sequential tasks are difficult to
optimize at the system level
– Leads to conflicts between the various functional
groups
• Changing to where the tasks are performed
concurrently (parallel) solves sequential problem
– Known as concurrent engineering or simultaneous
engineering
• Parallel tasking has been widely used for a great
diversity of projects

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 Copyright
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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