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Make Your Organization Work for You
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
The most efficient projects consist of multifunctional teams reporting to a project manager who manages the day-to-day work and team interaction with the rest of the organization. If only it were always so. Here’s some advice for those managing functional or matrix teams.
This is the first in a series of adapted excerpts from the author’s new book, Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management, published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
When everyone on the project owes their allegiance to the project, you’re managing a cross-functional team. You have more responsibility. You need to know enough about how everyone performs their jobs to be able to provide effective feedback and coaching to each person on your team. You might not manage everyone directly. In that case, your subproject managers and technical leads will have to know enough to provide effective feedback and coaching. However, when each team member has a responsibility to a functional team as well as the project team, this reduces the project manager's power to make things happen and slows work down. Here’s some advice for those managing functional or matrix teams.
Managing a Functional Team
Enlist the functional managers in your work to help make the team jell. You'll work with people to make sure they understand their assignments, not the …
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"Anyone can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way - that is not easy." - Aristotle |