CH 3- The Human Side of Project Management.ppt

1
Chapter 3:
The Human Side of Project Management
Information Systems Project Management
(MMIS 515)

2
Content
 Introduction
 Organization and Project Planning
 Stakeholder Analysis
 The Project Team
 Learning Cycles and Lessons Learned
 The Project Environment
 Project Team Charter
 Summary

3
Introduction
 The cultivation of motivated, highly skilled
software people has been discussed since
the 1960s
 In fact, the “people factor” is so important
that the Software Engineering Institute
has developed a people management
capability maturity model (PM-CMM), “to
enhance the readiness of software
organizations to undertake increasingly
complex applications by helping to attract,
grow, motivate, deploy, and retain the
talent needed to improve their software
development capability”

4
Introduction…
 The people management maturity model
defines the following key practice areas
for software people:
 Recruiting,
 Selection,
 Performance management,
 Training,
 Compensation,
 Career development,
 Organization and work design, and
 Team/culture development

5
Introduction…
 Organizations that achieve high levels of
maturity in the people management area
have a higher likelihood of implementing
effective software engineering practices.
 The PM-CMM is a companion to the
software capability maturity model that
guides organizations in the creation of a
mature software process

6
Introduction…
 The engineering vice presidents of three
major technology companies were asked
for the most important contributor to a
successful software project.
 VP 1: I guess if you had to pick one thing out
that is most important in our environment, I'd
say it's not the tools that we use, it's the
people.

7
Introduction…
the most important contributor to a
 VP 2: The most important ingredient that was
successful on this project was having smart
people . . . very little else matters in my
opinion. . . . The most important thing you do
for a project is selecting the staff . . . The
success of the software development
organization is very, very much associated
with the ability to recruit good people.

8
Introduction…
about the most important contributor to a
 VP 3: The only rule I have in management is
to ensure I have good people—real good
people—and that I grow good people—and
that I provide an environment in which good
people can produce.

9
Organization and Project Planning
Organizational Structure

10
– The Formal Organization
The Functional Organization (Advantages)
• Employees are grouped as per their
knowledge and skills, which helps achieve
the highest degree of performance.
• Employees are very skilled and efficient
because they are experienced in the same
work and hence they perform very well.
• Their role and responsibility is fixed, which
facilitates easy accountability for the work.

11
• The hierarchy is very clear, and employees
don’t have to report to multiple bosses.
Each employee reports to his functional
manager, which reduces the communication
channels.
• There is no duplication of work because
each department and each employee has a
fixed job responsibility.

12
• Employees feel secure, and therefore they
perform well without any fear.
• Since there is a sense of job security,
employees tend to be loyal to the
organization.
• Employees have a clear career growth path.
• Within the department, cooperation and
communication is excellent.

13
The Functional Organization (Disadvantages)
• Employees may feel bored due to the
monotonous, repeated type of work and
may become lazy.
• If the performance appraisal system is not
managed properly, conflicts may arise.
• For example, an employee may feel
demoralized when a lower performing
employee is promoted.

14
• The cost of high skilled employee is higher.
• The departments have a self-centred
mentality. The functional manager pays
more attention to only his department; he
usually doesn’t care about other
departments.

15
• Communication is not good among the
departments, which causes poor inter-
department coordination. This decreases
flexibility and innovation. Moreover, there is
a lack of teamwork among different
departments.
• Employees may have little concerns and
knowledge about anything happening
outside their department. This causes
obstacles in communication and
cooperation.

16
• The functional structure is rigid, and
therefore is slow to adapt to changes.
• Due to bureaucratic hierarchy, delays
happen in decision making.
• Generally the functional manager makes
decisions autocratically without consulting
the team members, hence it may not always
work in favour of the organization.

17
• When the organization becomes larger,
functional areas can become difficult to
manage due to their size. Each department
will start behaving like a small company
with its own facilities, culture and
management style.
• Functional departments may be distracted
by their own goals, and focus on them
rather than the organization’s goal.

18
The Functional Organization

19
 Advantages
 Clear authority and
responsibility
 Improved communication
 High level of integration
 Disadvantages
 Project isolation
 Duplication of effort
 Projectitis
The Project Organization

20
Projectitis
 It is a seeing of all things as though a particular project
were the center of the corporate universe — the alpha
and the omega of the development effort.
 The project manager on his own battleground needs a
modicum of "projectitis" to generate the necessary drive
and momentum to spark the project to success.
 In IT project management, projectitis sometimes occurs
when the project manager and project team develop a
strong attachment to the project and to each other. As a
result, these individuals may take a difficult time letting
go, and the project begins to take on a life of its own
with no real end in sight.

22
 A matrix organization structure is usually defined as one
where there are multiple reporting lines – that is, people
have more than one formal boss.
 This may incorporate solid lines (direct strong reporting)
and dotted lines (a weaker reporting relationship, but still
indicating some formal level of ‘right’ to the individual’s
time) or it may mean multiple solid lines to more than one
boss.
The Matrix Organization

23
 Forms
 Balanced matrix
 Functional matrix
 Project matrix
 Advantages
 High level of integration
 Improved communication
 Increased project focus
 Disadvantages
 Higher potential for conflict
 Poor response time
The Matrix Organization

25
Which Organizational
Structure Is The Best?
 Depends
 Nature of the organization’s products and services
 Business environment
 Organizational culture
 While the formal organizational structure tells us how
individuals or groups within an organization should
relate to one another, it does not tell us how they
actually relate.

26
The Informal Organization
 Bypasses formal lines of communication &
authority
 Power is determined by how well one is
connected in the informal network

27
– The Informal Organization
 Stakeholders –Individuals,groups or
organizations with a stake/claim in project’s
outcome
 Stakeholder Analysis
 Develop list of stakeholders with an interest in the
project
 Identify their interest in project
 Gauge their influence over project
 Define a role for each stakeholder
 Identify an objective for each stakeholder
 Identify strategies for each stakeholder

29
The Project Team
 The Roles of the Project Manager
 Managerial role
 Leadership role
 Attributes of a successful project manager
 ability to communicate with people
 ability to deal with people
 ability to create and sustain relationships
 ability to organize

30
The Project Team
 Team Selection and Acquisition
 Skills desired in team members
 technology skills
 business/organization skills
 interpersonal skills
 Size of team
 Source of team members

31
The Project Team
 Team Performance
 Work Groups
 Members interact to share information, best practices,
or ideas
 No shared performance goals (individual performance)
 No joint work-products
 No mutual accountability
 Viable in many situations

32
The Project Team
 Team Performance
 Real Teams
 Team basics
 Small number of people
 Complementary skills
 Commitment to a common purpose and performance goals
 Commitment to a common approach
 Mutual accountability

33
Teams vs. Groups
 A team is not just a group of people working
together
 Or because someone says they’re a team
 Teamwork is about values not about team
performance

34
The Project Team
 Real Teams
 Common sense findings:
 Teams flourish on a demanding performance challenge
 Team basics are often overlooked
 Most organizations prefer individual accountability to
team accountability
 Uncommon sense findings
 Strong performance goals spawn more real teams
 High performance teams are rare
 Real teams provide basis of performance
 Teams naturally integrate performance and learning

35
Radical Teams
 John Redding, 2000
 Based on a study of 20 teams
 A fundamentally new and different form of
team work
 Team work is based on “learning”
 Provides the basis for knowledge
management.
The Project Team

36
Project Teams and Knowledge
Management
 Traditional teams
 Accept background information at face value
 Approach projects in a linear fashion
 Provide run-of-the-mill solutions
 Radical teams
 Get to the root of the matter
 Do not accept information at face value
 Question and challenge the framing of the original
problem

37
Learning Cycles
 Derived from educator/philosopher John
Dewey (1938)
 Used to describe how people learn (Kolb,
1984; Honey & Mumford, 1994)
 Can be applied to project teams (Jeris, 1997;
Redding, 2000).

39
Learning Cycles and Lessons
Learned
 Phases of learning cycles
 Understand and frame problem
 Create a shared understanding
 What is the problem (or opportunity)?
 What are we trying to do?
 How are we going to do it?
 Starts out being general but becomes more defined
as the project proceeds

40
Learned
 Plan
 Teams plan actions to produce learning by answering
 What don’t we know that we need to know?
 What actions can we take between now & our next
meeting to find out what we need to know?
 How can we verify that what we are assuming is actually
true?

42
Learned
 Act
 Key to learning is action!
 What teams do outside of meetings is just as important as
what they do during meetings
 Test assumptions
 Experiment
 Gather new information
 Try out hunches (guesses)
 Only by acting do teams have the opportunity to learn

43
Action Plan for Team Learning

44
Learned
 Reflect and Learn
 Team meetings
 Document what have been learned
 Must occur
 In a spirit of openness
 Not in a climate of self-protection or criticism

45
Assessing Team Learning
 Speed
 Number of learning cycles completed
 The more cycles completed, the more learning that takes
place
 Depth
 Degree to which teams “reframe” their understanding of the
original problem
 Breadth (Impact)
 The impact of the results produced by the team
 Degree to which other projects, functional areas, or the
organization as a whole is influenced

46
Team Learning Cycles over the
Project Life Cycle

47
The Project Environment
 The project environment may be thought of in
terms of the project time environment, the
internal project culture, the original corporate
culture, and the external social surroundings.
 A place to call home
 Technology support
 Office supplies
 Culture

50
Summary
 Describe the three major types of formal
organizational structures: functional, pure project,
and matrix.
 Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the
functional, pure project, and matrix organizational
structures.
 Describe the informal organization.
 Develop a stakeholder analysis.
 Describe the difference between a work group and a
team.
 Describe and apply the concept of learning cycles
and lessons learned as a basis for knowledge
management.

51
Review Questions
 How project teams are organized? What are
main differences between functional
organization and project organization?
 What is informal team?
 What are main issues in project team
management?
 What is project team knowledge
management?
 What is your plan for the team organization

52
Individual Assignment-2
 Paper Review
 Utilization of a Set of Software Engineering Roles for
a Multinational Organization (Laporte et al. 2007)
 Due Date Wednesday 22.03.17

53
Group Assignment-2
 Chapter Review
 Rogers Pressman (2001); Software Engineering a
practitioner’s approach, 5th ed.
 PART-II Managing Software Projects
 Group 1: Chapter 7- Project Scheduling and Tracking
 Group 2: Chapter 8- Software Quality Assurance
 Group 3: Chapter 9- Software Configuration Management
 Due Date 26.03.17

CH 3- The Human Side of Project Management.ppt

More Related Content

Similar to CH 3- The Human Side of Project Management.ppt (20)

More from amanuel236786 (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

CH 3- The Human Side of Project Management.ppt