Aligning Pressure and Desire to Increase Performance

  Teams   Knowledge Shelf  

Products or services that employ specialized, new, or uncertain technologies are often a requirement for gaining or retaining strategic advantage in certain lucrative markets. The lifeblood of these emerging technologies is successful and relevant innovation—a process that is dependent on skilled resources that need to be managed to ensure success. Due to the competitive nature of such innovation, the ensuing time, financial, and risk pressures make project managers a key part of this value process. In these environments, however, the normal challenges of project management can be exacerbated by the added pressure of managing teams of highly skilled human resources who determine the success of the project.

It is the very nature of good managers to seek optimal performance from the people who report to them and especially from the architect-level resources in the project. For this reason, much thinking and theorizing have gone into achieving human capital performance improvement: it is seen as a key to achieving overall management success, whether for project, office, or line managers. Of these, project managers often have an especially challenging time, because resources move on and off projects without the project manager having much say in how they are motivated; having said that, we project managers are typically innovative and imaginative individuals who relish…

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