The human side of Project Management

October 13 2011

Posted by Manfredi Bargioni

Project Managers should focus on people rather than administrative tasks.

According to the dictionary, a community is "an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location or sharing a common interest".  The same definition can be equally applied to projects, where interacting individuals work together towards a (hopefully) common goal.

But while the word "community" evokes images of people talking to each other, sharing ideas, discussing and taking decisions together, the term "project" is usually associated with flow-charts, Gantt and other technical stuff.  This technocratic view of project management is not completely wrong, as these items are a necessary infrastructure to ensure efficiency and compliance, but it is extremely limiting since the human component is often in the critical path, so to speak, of any project.

Project managers are not F1 pilots, driving a well oiled machine with precise components perfectly engineered to deliver the optimal response to the driver's input. PM are more akin to orchestra directors trying to meld a group of individual voices into a cohesive musical ensemble.  But as any sport coach will be able to tell you, transforming a group of individuals into a team is not a question of rules or tactics, it's about giving purpose, creating a shared sense of identity and an intangible team spirit that translates into a total that it is more than the sum of its parts.

The role of the project manager then is to create the proper environment for the project resources to become a team, to motivate them to see the bigger picture and go beyond simply performing their assigned tasks. It is a complicated activity, requiring both personal skills and the proper tools to foster collaboration and the quick flow of information within the team. Most importantly it's a human activity that needs to leverage and accommodate personal abilities, characters and attitudes. Overall, coaching and managing should take a significant percentage of the Project Manager time in each project, unfortunately this is not often the case because, without the proper support tools, Project Managers spend most of their time firefighting, running around patching things up rather than really planning and managing the work of the team.

Advanced Project Management and Project Automation tools are crucial for empowering the Project Manager to concentrate on managing people instead of processes. The right tool can eliminate useless administrative tasks, increase transparency and enable instant team collaboration, clearing the path for the Project Manager to spend time on solving problems and actively coaching the team resources. On the other hand, the wrong tool (or no tool at all) means wasting time looking for status updates, attributing responsibilities and sharing information, bogging down the PM in the minutiae of the project rather than what makes the final result successful or not.

Project Managers are often resistant to the changes that a Project Automation tool injects in their traditional working flow and cling to outdated working customs, like the weekly, manually updated Excel spreadsheet with magnifying glass-size fonts. PMs may thinks that it allows them flexibility but instead it robs them of the opportunity to concentrate on what is really important to achieve a successful project: managing the people that work on it.