Continued from our last PLOG (no.7 Human Resource Management, Part I/II)

4. Managing the newly formed team
Every project manager will have his own techniques. I like to break it down to two basic types: One, managing in a group setting, such as the daily scrum or weekly team review meeting; and two, the one on one meeting. The former is fairly straight forward and common to most organizations and teams so I won't go into it. However, of special note is the personal one to one meetings that you will invariably have with staff. They may not be regular, outside the quarterly or bi-annual review, however, on occasion you may need to keep an eye out for special particular instances that require more impromptu meetings. They may include and staff operating very distant, more than his norm. It may be a member that continuously argues with other members or yourself.

It may be someone who is exhibiting signs of dissatisfaction or it simply may be time to promote an outstanding individual. While hard to accurately diagnose here in this forum, you will hopefully be able, with time, acutely focus your attention on certain individuals, at the right time. Whatever the case may be, once identified, you're going to take this individual aside and you're going to simply talk to him/her. Without passing judgment, you'll actively listen and take note. You may nothing in fact. You may have to come back to this person having given it some thought and come up with an action plan. More often than not, this plan will likely indicate that such a plan was unfortunately not already in place before problems started arising. In any case, this new plan will at a minimum indicate what the problem is, how you can go about fixing it, based on clear measurable results in a clearly identified time line.

5. Conflict Resolution
This is a huge area. I can't conceivably do this topic justice here and now. Suffice to say, that in our 3 day course, we take our students through a case study example where individuals are asked to play roles. A scenario is drawn up, that may not look too far from something that is experienced in your actual day to day life in the office. Invariably, conflict arises in our study. We analyze what went wrong, how you can fix it, then have the students redo the exercise. Believe it or not, there is a art and science behind good conflict resolution.

6. Achieving High Quality Decisions
Wow. What does that mean? Wouldn't we all like to know how to do that. Well for starters, let me say that all too often, in our rush to get our personal agendas out of the way onto the table, we over look the simple fact that we need at the end of the day high quality decisions. To do that we need a system of setting up the scenario to achieve high quality decisions. But what is a high quality decision? It's a decision that has a clear, specific, measurable result or at least the mechanics outlined to attain those desired results. Such a better decision will have an owner. Owner equals accountability. It will be available for all to see. Visibility equals transparency. Transparency equals no surprises. But how about the differences between responsible, accountable, those whom need consultation, and those that require simple informing? More on that later.

7.8.9. Communications, Negotiations and Leadership
I'll lump the above three items here into one single point. In part because there is some overlap with other topics that I've already covered or am going to cover. What I will say safely, is that these points fall into the generic category of what people call 'soft skills' of the project manager. This area is very much diverse, with many tools and techniques that can be employed to better manage your team. And they're all covered in our three day course. When you've done this part effectively, you will have likely made doing your job significantly easier. The old adage in marketing applies equally here that "the cost of acquisition of a new customer, is ten times more than keeping your existing one". Work better with what you have.

So now as you prepare for the festive season, the new year or that family vacation cruise, don't forget to put into use, some of the techniques mentioned above. You've been given the team, whose choice of members is essentially out of your control. You'll no doubt have some team players, some not, some keeners, some not, some feel that they could be doing something different, doing more, doing less, happy, sad. If you're going to make this happen, it's up to you to put the team together, manage them, utilizing individuals for their particular strengths towards your ultimate goal. 

That concludes this installment of our PLOG. In my next plog, I'll look at no.8 of our continuing series of the nine project management knowledge areas, Quality Management. How do we achieve quality without sacrificing on our timeliness?

Sincerely,
William Beacon, PMP
ProjectMilestone.com