Human Resource Management

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Human Resource Management
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Sandys Day Care

• Describe the 3 issues

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Roles and Responsibilities

• Project sponsor
• Senior management
• Project team
• Stakeholders
• Functional manager
• Project manager

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Project sponsor

• Person who provides the financial resources for
  the project
• Role
• Formally accepts the product of the project
  during scope verification and administrative
  closure (customer)
• May provide key events, milestones, and
  deliverable due dates (customer and other
  stakeholders)
• Take into account threshold for risk of the
  sponsor (customer)
• Sponsor does NOT sign the charter

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Senior management

• Anyone senior to the project manager in the
  organization
• Role
• Help organize work into projects
• Provide project team with time to plan
• Encourage finalization of requirements and scope
  by the stakeholders
• Determine priorities between triple (quadruple)
  constraint
• Set priorities between projects
• Issue the project charter
• Identify many risks
• Protect the project from outside influences
• Help evaluate tradeoffs during crashing,
  fast-tracking and re-estimating
• Determine reports needed by management
• Approve final project plan
• Resolve conflicts that extend beyond PMs control

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Project Team

• Help plan Complete work packages or tasks and
  watch for deviations from the project plan
• Create WBS
• Identify constraints and assumptions
• Identify stakeholders
• Attend project team meetings
• Create change control system
• Identify dependencies
• Provide cost and time estimates
• Determine reserves
• Review project performance reports
• Determine and measure corrective action
• Determine definition of quality and plan to meet
  criteria

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Characteristics of Effective Project Team Members

• Technically Competent
• Politically Sensitive
• Problem Orientation
• Goal Orientation
• High Self-Esteem

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Project stakeholders

• Stakeholders is a PMIism
• Receive information about project including
  performance reports
• Use expert judgment to help create contents of
  project charter and scope statement
• Are involved in
• Project plan development
• Approving project changes and on change control
  board
• Scope verification
• Identifying constraints
• Risk management
• Become risk owners so their risk tolerance is
  important to assess

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Functional manager

• PM must coordinate with FM to meet resource needs
• Involvement depends on organizational structure
  (project, matrix, functional)
• Assign individuals to teams and negotiate with PM
  regarding resources
• Participate in initial planning
• Involved in go/no-go decisions
• Approve final schedule
• Approve final project plan
• Assist in planning corrective action
• Assist with problems related to team member
  performance
• Improve staff utilization
• Inform PM of impact of other projects

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Project manager

• Assigned to project as early as possible
• Requires authority and accountability to
  accomplish work
• Deal with conflicting or unrealistic scope,
  quality, schedule, risk and other requirements
• Integrates project components into a cohesive
  whole that meets customers needs
• Must have authority to say no when necessary
• Held accountable for project failure
• Is in charge of the project but not necessarily
  the resources
• Leads and directs project planning
• Assists team and stakeholders during execution
• Maintains control by measuring performance and
  taking corrective action

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Three Overriding Responsibilities

• Acquiring Resources
• getting necessary quantity and quality can be key
  challenge
• irrational optimism
• Preventing and Fighting Fires and Obstacles
• Leadership and Making Trade-Offs

Roles and Responsibilities Exercise
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FITTING PROJECTS IN THE PARENT ORGANIZATION
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Figure 2-2 The Pure Project Organization
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The Pure Project Organization

• Advantages
• Effective and efficient for large projects
• Resources available as needed
• Broad range of specialists
• short lines of communication
• Drawbacks
• Expensive for small projects
• Specialists may have limited technological depth
• May require high levels of duplication for
  certain specialties

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Figure 2-3 Functional Project Organization
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Functional Project Organization

• Advantages
• technological depth
• Drawbacks
• lines of communication outside functional
  department slow
• technological breadth
• project rarely given high priority

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Figure 2-4 Matrix Project Organization
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Matrix Project Organization

• 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
• Drawbacks
• violation of the Unity of Command principle
• complexity of managing full set of projects
• conflict

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Figure 2-5 Mixed Project Organization
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Project Organizational Structures from PMBOK
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HR Responsibilities of PM

• Create a project team directory
• Negotiate with functional (resource) managers for
  the best resources
• Create project job descriptions team and
  stakeholders
• Understand the needs of the team and stakeholders
  for training related to the project work and
  ensure they receive that training
• Create a formal staffing management plan how
  each team member and stakeholder will be involved
  in the project and the role they are to perform

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Staffing Management Plan

• Identify all stakeholders
• Identify needs, expectations, objectives
• Determine the roles of each stakeholder
• Determine the skills and knowledge of each
  stakeholder
• Assess overall impact of stakeholders
• Determine how stakeholders should be managed

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Powers of the PM

• Formal (legitimate) power based on your
  position. Do the work because I have been put
  in charge.
• Reward I understand that you have been wanting
  to participate in the acceptance testing of this
  project. Because of your performance, I will
  assign you as part of that team.
• Penalty (coercive) If this does not get done
  on time, I will remove you from the group going
  to Hawaii for the customer meeting!
• Expert We should listen to the project
  manager. She is the world authority on this
  technology!
• Referent The vice president has put this
  project at the top of his list! We will do the
  work on this project 1st.

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Leadership Styles

• Directing telling others what to do
• Facilitating coordinating input of others
• Coaching instructing others
• Supporting providing assistance
• Autocratic making decisions w/o input
• Consultative inviting ideas
• Consensus problem solving in a group with
  decision-making based on group agreement

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Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Persuasion

• Necessary to meet three overriding
  responsibilities

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Where does conflict occur

• Listed in order of frequency
• Schedules
• Project priorities
• Resources
• Technical opinions
• Administrative procedures
• Cost
• Personality

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Patterns of Conflict Resolution

• Withdrawing or avoidance
• Smoothing
• Collaboration/Confrontation/Problem Solving
• Compromising
• Forcing

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Effective/Ineffective Conflict Resolution (Burke,
1969)
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Fight

• Forcing (24.5, 79.2)
• a win-lose situation
• participants are antagonists, competitors not
  collaborators.
• Fixed positions, polarization.
• Creates a victor and a vanquished
• Compromising (11.3, 5.7)
• splitting the difference, bargaining, search for
  an intermediate position.
• Better half a loaf than none at all
• no one loses but no one wins.

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Or Flight

• Withdrawing (0, 9.4)
• easier to retreat from an argument
• silence is golden
• see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil
• Smoothing (0, 1.9)
• play down differences and emphasize common
• interests issues that might cause divisions or
  hurt feelings are not discussed

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Win/Win

• Collaboration/Confrontation/Problem Solving
  (58.5, 0)
• open exchange of information about conflict or
  problem as each sees it
• a working through of their differences to reach a
  solution that is optimal to both.
• Getting to Yes Negotiating Agreement without
  Giving In by Fisher and Ury

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Problematic Processes
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Problematic processes

• Folly
• Groupthink
• Trip to Abilene
• Garbage can model of organizational choice
• Boiled frog syndrome

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Folly

• Barbara Tuchman historian
• 1984 The March of Folly
• Define tendency of governments to act stubbornly
  and perversely against their own best interests
• "Character is fate
• "The power to command frequently causes failure
  to think"
• folly is a child of power.

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Criteria for Folly

• For a course of action to be considered folly it
  must meet the following
• Contemporaries must see the situation as folly
• Another, better, course of action must have been
  available
• Course of action must have been pursued by a
  group (not an individual).

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Tuchmans Folly examples

• Trojan horse decision of the Trojans to bring
  the Trojan horse into the city.
• Protestant uprising Renaissance Popes provoked
  the Protestant uprising
• American Revolution loss of the American
  colonies by the British
• Vietnam War failure of the US policies in
  Vietnam

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Groupthink
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Groupthink

• Irving Janus 1972
• Definition a deterioration of mental efficiency,
  reality testing, and moral judgment that results
  from in-group pressures
• a kind of thinking in which maintaining group
  cohesiveness and solidarity is more important
  than considering the facts in a realistic manner.
  

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Groupthink examples

• Mass suicides Heavens Gate
• Poor political decision Bay of Pigs
• Possible examples of groupthink in action
• British attempts to appease Nazis, late 1930s
  (Munich)
• Unpreparedness for Japanese attack at Pearl
  Harbor, 1941
• Ford Edsel, 1956 (net loss to Ford of 300
  million)
• US-sponsored invasion of Cuba at Bay of Pigs,
  1961
• Decision to market Thalidomide (tranquilizer),
  1961
• Escalation of US involvement in Vietnam War,
  1960s
• Watergate scandal, early 1970s
• Attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, 1980
• Space shuttle Challenger disaster, 1986

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Trip to Abilene
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Trip to Abilene

• a group can commit to a course that no member
  favors.
• In a trip to Abilene, nobody feels that the group
  is behaving sensibly.
• Because they all feel that everyone else favors
  the group's choice, no one questions it.
• The group then takes action that no one agrees
  with.

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Garbage can model of organization choice

• Cohen, March, and Olsen
• Model for organized anarchies i.e. universities
• Problematic preferences
• Unclear technologies
• Fluid participation

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Garbage can model of organizational choice

• Collection of choices looking for problems to
  solve
• Issues and feelings looking for issues to which
  they might be an answer
• Characteristics
• Does not resolve problems well
• Enables choices to be made
• Goal uncertainty
• Poorly understood problems

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Boiling frog syndrome

• if you throw a frog into a saucepan of boiling
  water it will jump straight out (well wouldn't
  you?)
• if you put it in a saucepan of cold water on a
  very low heat then the frog will not realize that
  the water is slowly warming up and will boil to
  death!

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Boiling frog syndrome

• Definition gradual negative changes in the work
  environment occur because of internal or external
  forces. Employees tolerate these changes and
  apparently do not perceive them.
• Symptoms
• Low employee morale
• High employee turnover
• Degradation in employee performance
• Overall drop in organizations effectiveness