Avoiding the Casualties of Project-Based Work

 

The other day while channel surfing, I stumbled upon an old episode of the highly successful television series M*A*S*H.  In my opinion,  the M*A*S*H TV series eclipsed the success of the movie.  I loved watching the characters develop and grow over the 11 years the series ran, culminating in the most watched TV episode ever, for the series finale.

The particular episode I stumbled upon dealt with a general whose cavalier attitude about the lives he lost in battle made him the bane of doctors Pierce and Honeycut.  The General, focused on overcoming the enemy to take an unnamed hill, and considered the projected casualties nothing more than an acceptable number of resources lost to win the battle.

While I don't believe the casualties of project-based work are the same as the lives of those lost in battle, I do believe they exist.  And, I would never want to minimize the loss to families who have lost a loved one in armed conflict anywhere in the world, so I am treading carefully here.  That being said, regardless of the situation, when any organization forgets that their human resources are actually people—there will be casualties.

Unfortunately, most project management software tends to treat people like raw materials managers can push around a time-line like pawns on a chess board.  Although I'm a real believer in the value of project software, I believe that it's the people that work on project teams that are actually responsible for getting work done.

For example, if your definition of resource management or capacity planning stops at dropping names or job roles on the time-line of an interactive Gantt chart, maybe you should take a step back and reconsider.  The "manager" in project manager implies something more than managing process in my mind.

"Resource management" and "capacity planning" might not be the best words to use, but to be fair, project management has evolved into a highly-technical discipline and therefore employs impersonal and technical language.  In fact, not too long ago, a coworker was reading something I had written and asked, What does resource management really mean?  Are you talking about human resources, raw materials, or something else?"

His point was well taken.  I spent a few extra minutes and more clearly defined what I was talking about.  (Although I haven't been able to come up with a better name for it yet either.)

Although some of the casualties of project-based work (or rather forgetting the project team is made up of people) are considered soft-costs—not all are.  Here are four casualties to name a few—feel free to add to the list anything I've left out:

1. Morale: Morale is the biggest casualty, and the foundation for many of the other casualties
2. Employee turnover: Where there is poor morale, there is high employee turnover and the associated hard costs of training new employees to replace those lost
3. A drop in productivity: This is another hard cost to organizations with poor morale—unmotivated employees just don't get as much done
4. A drop in revenue: The cost of turnover and poor productivity at some point start to cost real money—which is where many organizations start to take project casualties seriously

How does an organization avoid casualties?  It starts by remembering that the resources being moved around the resource grid are people.  It also involves spending time engaging the workforce in the project management process.  Today's workforce expects more from a career than a mindless job.  The rules have changed, an engaged workforce is the key to project success, and facilitating that really doesn't take that much:

1. Empowerment: The workforce (people) want to be empowered with ownership and the ability to contribute to the benchmarks and time-lines associated with what they are doing.
2. Recognition: People take pride in their work and they care about what their managers and peers think of them and their accomplishments.  We all crave recognition for a job well done (even if we don't publicly admit it).  Organizations that are able to successfully accomplish this are more likely to have a happy and engaged workforce.

In the M*A*S*H episode I described earlier, Hawkeye poisoned the general so he could do an emergency appendectomy and take him out of commission for a few weeks—ultimately forcing I-Corp to replace the general with someone else.  Hopefully, reducing the number of casualties in your organizations won't rely on morally suspect methods—just common sense and the Golden Rule.

Please share what you do within your project teams to keep casualties to a minimum.