Inspired by the Norm Smith talk I recently heard (see previous post), I purchased his book Got Progress? and highly recommend it. I now have words to describe some of the unease I’ve been feeling about my workplace’s current project management and resource allocation approaches.
The brightest light bulb went off when Norm bold-faced (and I’m paraphrasing): Build project management structures for the people doing the work, not management. In particular, Norm revealed that he rarely found a resource-loaded project plan very useful and integrated master plans even less so. Why? Part of the reason, is these things are usually done for management, not for team members.
Where I work, we spent a lot of time developing a system to let management know if we have enough resources to do the projects we want to do. We’ve evolved from rough estimates to complicated spreadsheets to an online project task and resource tracking tool to a interwoven combination of all these tools. We have reports that go from project managers to a resource review committee to upper management. In short, we have a very complicated system that ensures resource estimates and allocations are properly conveyed from project mangers to upper management. The problem is, the average employee would agree with Norm Smith in saying it’s great the management knows (or at least, thinks they know) where resources are allocated, but wouldn’t it be nice if the project team members (also called Project Implementation Specialists, in PMBOK speak, I just recently discovered) also knew where they were allocated?
We’ve built a very details system of resource tracking mechanisms for management, not for project members. We have tools that tell management that every staff member is fully allocated to the necessary projects, yet when I talked to several random project members recently, they admitted to not knowing everything they are supposed to be doing. Clearly, the complex system derived to let management know that everyone is properly allocated to the projects to which they should be allocated, is failing to make the resources themselves aware of what’s expected of them.
Crazy idea: develop the system so that project members each have a clear understanding of what their tasks are and let over-allocated resources (conflicts) rise from below. If employee-X knows what tasks are expected of him and doesn’t have a problem getting everything done on time, what more does management need? Similarly, if employee-Y realizes she can’t do all of her project work on the schedule required, she can raise her concern upstream without complicated structures and calculations put in place to detail her exact level of loading.
Our goal is to get the work done. It does no good for management to look at an integrated master plan and see that everyone is assigned the right percentage of time for the right tasks if the employees themselves don’t know what’s expected of them. Build a system that makes it clear what is expected of them (and that system would ideally be tailored to the individual, team, and particular project), and you have a system that has buy-in, accountability, and self-policing. If the work is getting done and conflicts are identified and highlighted by those doing the work, management can focus on only the conflicts that arise, and the project implementation specialists can concentrate on getting their projects implemented!
Speaking of project implementation specialists, Scot found Norm Smith’s book so useful partially because it clearly represented real-world experience with project management. Textbook project management, like the PMBOK, for example, provides a fine framework for project management, but needs to be implemented while taking account of real project complexities and not treating each project as if were the ideal project. Like the frictionless pulley, Scot suspects the idealized PMBOK project doesn’t exist.