Chapter 5:

Human Resource Management

School of Civil Engineering

Outline of this Chapter
 Introduction to HRM
 Project HRM Processes
 Management and Leadership style

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Project Human Resource Management
· It includes the processes required to make the most
effective use of the people involved with a project.
• It includes the processes that organize, manage, and
lead the project team. The project team is comprised of
the people with assigned roles and responsibilities for
completing the project.
• Early involvement and participation of team members
benefits:
o add their expertise during the planning process
o strengthens their commitment

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Definition
· The process of hiring and developing employees so that
they become more valuable to the organization.
· Human Resource Management includes:
· conducting job analyses,
· planning personnel needs,
· recruiting the right people for the right job,
· orienting and training,
· managing wages and salaries,
· providing benefits and incentives,
· evaluating performance,
· resolving disputes, and
· communicating with all employees at all

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Project Human Resource Management

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Importance of HRM
• Human Resource Management is important to all
managers despite their various functions because
of the following reasons-
• Hire the right person for the job
• Low attrition rate
• Ensure people do their best
• Time saved in not conducting useless interviews
• Avoid legal action for any discrimination
• Safety laws are not ignored
• Equity towards employee in relation to salary etc.
• Effective training
• Avoid unfair labor practices

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Project HRM Processes
A. Plan Human Resource Management—The process of
identifying and documenting project roles, responsibilities,
required skills, reporting relationships, and creating a staffing
management plan.
B. Acquire Project Team—The process of confirming human
resource availability and obtaining the team necessary to
complete project activities.
C. Develop Project Team—The process of improving
competencies, team member interaction, and overall team
environment to enhance project performance.
D. Manage Project Team—The process of tracking team member
performance, providing feedback, resolving issues, and
managing changes to optimize project performance.

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Project HRM Processes

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Develop Human Resource Plan
· The process of identifying and documenting project roles,
responsibilities, and required skills, reporting relationships
and creating a staffing management plan.

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Organization Chart & Position Desc. (Tools & Techniques)
· Ensure that each work package has an unambiguous owner.
· All team members have a clear understanding of their roles and
responsibility.
· Types:
· Hierarchical e.g. Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS)
· Matrix e.g. Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) e.g. RACI
(responsible, accountable, consult, inform)
· Text-oriented

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Human Resource Plan (Output)
• HR plan includes (but not limited · Resource Histogram
to) Bar chart shows number of
1. Roles and responsibilities resource used per time
• Role period
• Authority
• Responsibility
• Competency
2. Project Organization Chart
3. Staffing Management Plan
• Staff Acquisition
• Resource calendars
• Staff release plan
• Training needs
• Recognition and rewards
• Compliance, Safety.

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Acquire Project Team
· The process of confirming human resource availability and
obtain the team necessary to complete project
assignments.
· The key benefit of this process is that it results in improved
teamwork, enhanced people skills and competencies,
motivated employees, reduced staff turnover rates, and
improved overall project performance.

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Acquire Project Team (Tools and Techniques)
· Pre-assignment
· Resources who are assigned in advance
· Negotiation
· For gaining resources within the organization or external vendors,
suppliers, contractors, etc. (in contract situation)
· Acquisition
· Acquiring/hiring from outside resources (outsource)
· Virtual teams
· Think the possibilities of having group of people even little or no
time spent to meet face to face

"Interdependent people combine their own efforts, with the

efforts of others to achieve their greatest success."

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Acquire Project Team

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Develop Project Team
· The process of improving the competencies, team
interaction, and the overall team environment to enhance
project performance.

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Develop Project Team (Tools and Techniques)
· Interpersonal skills
· Training
· Can be formal (classroom, online) or non-formal (on-job training,
mentoring, coaching)
· Ground rules
· Guidelines that establish clear expectation regarding acceptable
behavior by teams
· Discussion to create it by all team members
· Co-location
· Placing many or all the most active team members in the same physical
location
· Can be temporary for strategy to enhance communication & build sense of
community
· Recognition & reward
· It will only be effective if it is valued by individual
· Plans concerning how to do it are developed during Develop Human
Resource Plan

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Team Building Activities (Tools & Techniques)

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Tuckman’s team building theory

· Team trying to learn about · Team trying to work

each other & work/tasks through differences.
· High dependence on PM · PM coach the team.
for guidance & direction.
· Constant conflicts &
· Unclear roles and arguments
responsibilities
· Team – Differences,
· Team — independent, frustration
nervous

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Tuckman’s team building theory

· Set ground rules to work · Pick performance &

together complete tasks.
· PM provide autonomy & · PM delegate work & allow
participate team manage it.
· Team is developing but · Work as single team.
Challenge continues · Team help each other &
· Team - adjusting for team work together
work

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Tuckman’s team building theory

· Complete all work &

disperse
· PM help team to move on
· Team feels sense of loss and
deforms
· Team gets demotivated &
feel uncertainty

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Motivation Theory: McGregor’s X & Y Theory

· Theory X
· People tends to be negative, passive e.g. incapable,
avoid responsibility, need to be watched
· Extrinsic Motivation
· Theory Y
· People tends to be positive e.g. want to achieve, willing to work
without supervision, can direct their own effort
· Intrinsic Motivation

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Motivation Theory: Z Theory

Theory Z (Dr William Ouchi)

Focused on increasing employee loyalty to the

company

Provide a job for life

Strong focus on the well-being of the employee,

both on and off the job.

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Motivation Theory: Acquired Needs Theory
David McClelland’s Theory
· People are motivated by one of the three needs

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Motivation Theory: Two Factors Theory
Herzberg’s Theory
– Job dissatisfaction due to lack of hygiene factors
– Job satisfaction due to motivation factors
Hygiene Factors
- Working condition
- Salary
- Personal life
- Relationship at work
- Security
- Status

Motivation Factors
- Responsibility
- Self actualization
- Professional growth
- Recognition

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Manage Project Team
· The process of tracking team member performance,
providing feedback, resolving issues, and managing
changes to optimize project performance.

There is no “I” in “team” but apparently there is one hidden somewhere in

“group project”

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How do organizations develop a quality workforce?

• Multi-person comparisons
• Formally compare one person’s performance with that of one or
more others.
• Types of multi-person comparisons:
o Rank ordering, Paired comparisons, Forced distributions
• Alternatives to supervisory appraisal:
• Peer appraisal
o Occurs when people who work regularly and directly with a jobholder
are involved in the appraisal.
• Upward appraisal
o Occurs when subordinates reporting to the jobholder are involved in
the appraisal.
• 360° feedback
o Occurs when superiors, subordinates, peers, and even internal and
external customers are involved in the appraisal of a jobholder’s
performance.
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How do organizations develop a quality workforce?
• Career development
• Career — a sequence of jobs that constitute what a person does
for a living.
• Career path — a sequence of jobs held over time during a career.
• Career planning —matching career goals and individual
capabilities with opportunities for their fulfillment.
• Career plateau — a position from which someone is unlikely to
move to a higher level of responsibility.
o Progressive employers seek ways to engage plateaued employees.

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How do organizations maintain a quality workforce?
• Work-life balance
• How people balance career demands with personal and family
needs.
• Progressive employers support a healthy work-life balance.
• Contemporary work-life balance issues:
o Single parent concerns
o Dual-career couples concerns
o Family-friendliness as screening criterion used by candidates
• Compensation and benefits
• Base compensation
o Salary or hourly wages
• Fringe benefits
o Additional non-wage or non-salary forms of compensation
• Flexible benefits
o Employees can select a set of benefits within a certain dollar amount .

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How do organizations maintain a quality workforce?

• Compensation and benefits (cont.)

• Family-friendly benefits
o Help in balancing work and non-work responsibilities
• Employee assistance programs
o Help employees deal with troublesome personal problems.
• Retention and turnover
• Replacement is the management of promotions, transfers,
terminations, layoffs, and retirements.
• Replacement decisions relate to:
o Shifting people between positions within the organization.
o Retirement.
o Termination.

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How do organizations maintain a quality workforce?

• Labor-management relations
• Labor unions deal with employers on the workers’ behalf.
• Labor contracts specify the rights and obligations of employees
and management regarding wages, work hours, work rules,
seniority, hiring, grievances, and other conditions of employment
• Collective bargaining is the process of negotiating, administering,
and interpreting a labor contract.

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How do organizations maintain a quality workforce?

· The traditional adversarial view of labor-management relations.

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Conflict Management
· Conflicts can be beneficial (an opportunities for improvement)
· Conflicts is an inevitable consequence of organizational interactions
· Conflicts in the team are caused due to the following reasons in
decreasing order of occurrences
1. Schedules
2. Project priorities
3. Resources
4. Technical opinions
· The most common cause of conflicts in projects are issues related to
schedules (not personality differences)
· Conflict is best resolved by those involved in the conflict

"When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with
creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion."

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Conflict Management
· General techniques to resolve conflict

Confronting & Problem Solving

Treating conflict as problem to be

solved by examining alternatives;

Requires a give and take attitude

and open dialogue.

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Problem Solving
· The important thing to realize about problem is if they are
not solved completely, they just return again and again.
· The process of problem solving has these steps
1. Define the cause of the problem
2. Analyze the problem
3. Identify solution
4. Implement a decision
5. Review the decision, and confirm that the problem is solved.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we

used when we created them”

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Project Manager Power
· A Project Manager may yield authority over the project team in one of
the following ways
· Formal (Legitimate) (able to use organizational position) - Power due to
Project Managers position
· Reward (able to offer incentives) – Power stems from giving rewards.
· Penalty (Coercive) (able to use punishment) – Power due to afraid of the
power the Project Manager holds.
· Expert (Technical) (able to use personal knowledge) – Comes from being
technical or project management expert.
· Referent – Power of charisma and fame. Make another person
liking/respecting the Project Manager.

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Management & Leadership Style
· Autocratic
· Top down approach. The manager has power to do whatever she/he
wants
· Sometime appropriate when decisions must be made for emergency
situation or time pressure
· Democratic/Participative
· Encouraging team participation in the decision making process
· Best used for people whose behavior fit with theory Y
· Laissez-faire - a French term means “leave alone”
· The manager is not directly involve in the work of the team.
· Effective for highly skilled team

“Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of

their ability to empower others”

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PM Responsibilities
· Determine what resources you will need
· Negotiate with resource manager for optimal available resources
• Create a project team directory
• Create project job descriptions for team members and other
stakeholders
• Make sure all roles and responsibilities on the project are clearly
assigned
• Understand team members’ needs for training related to their work
on the project, and make sure they get the training.
• Insert reports of team members’ performance
• Send out letters of commendation to team members and their
bosses
• Make sure team members’ needs are taken care of
• Create recognition & rewards system

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Project Manager Interpersonal Skills
· Leadership
· Team building
· Motivation
· Communicating
· Influencing
· Decision Making
· Political and cultural awareness
· Negotiation

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Five Dysfunctions of a Team
· The five dysfunctions of teams are
1. Absence of trust
2. Fear of conflict
3. Lack of commitment
4. Avoidance of accountability
5. Inattention to results

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General Advice on Teams
1. Be patient and kind with your team
2. Fix the problem instead of blaming people
3. Establish regular, effective meetings
4. Allow time for teams to go through the basic team-building stages
5. Limit the size of work teams to three to seven members
6. Plan some social activities to help project team members and other
stakeholders get to know each other better
7. Stress team identity
8. Nurture or cultivate team members and encourage them to help each
other
9. Take additional actions to work with virtual team members

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 Many Thanks for your attention!

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