Eye on the Workforce

Barriers to teaming will slow down your project with isues that may not be appropriate for your project issues list, such as

“One of our team members is such as expert, he refuses to do work”
or
“I’m finding it difficult to engage a co-worker in completing a task."
or
"They don't like me here and I can't get work done."

In my last post, I started to describe barriers listed in this working paper (pdf) from Harvard Business School and how you can knock down some of these barriers in your project. In the working paper, researchers solved a problem in routine health care emergency room management, but the issues and barriers were similar to, albeit worse than, issues in project management.

 Team Obstacle #2:  High-level of effort involved in meeting people and engaging them in shared tasks.

 Several factors lead to this barrier.

• In general some personalities find it difficult to interact with others. They are not shy necessarily; their introverted nature just does not naturally result in skills to engage others in shared tasks. This is not the “nerd defense;” it is the human condition.
• Consider the plight of project contingency workers. They may not know employees at the start of teaming. They may not know the organizational relationships or interpersonal dynamics of the employees. To make matters worse, they may suffer that a stigma from being a contingent employee.
• Another factor to consider comes from team obstacle #1. Some powerful individuals or bullies will abuse their power in teams and not fulfill their responsibilities.

 What can you do to help with this mixed bag of problems?

• Make introductions more effective by sending biographical info in advance. Promote each team member, focusing on their expertise and experience relevant to your project. Get help from co-workers if you need it and make sure information is accurate. You don’t have to exaggerate but focus on achievements that are project-relevant.
• When introducing those with more potential power, describe the benefits of this power in terms of their ability to help directly with team task completion. That’s a project management “Judo move.”
• You typically receive bio information about contingency employees during selection. Use this to make their introductions like regular employees. This equal treatment will help minimize contingency stigma.
• Make sure team leads reemphasize during the project that when a project co-worker expresses the intention to work together to complete a task, it is expected that the individual requested will participate actively to complete the task.

* Judo is a martial art where practitioners use the strength and power of opponents against them.

OK, there are a couple more barriers to teaming that we will address next and these will also interrelated with the first two. Until then, let me know what problems are you having with effective teaming and how these problems are affecting your project?

Teaming is important to the success of projects yet we don't formalize the practice enough. We don't institute best practices around teaming or spend time to resolve intra-team interaction issues when they are behind delays.  Maybe we just want  to avoid the drama. Whatever is behind the missed opportunities, we know it is better to get teams up to speed quickly and keep them performing at a high level. Internal problems on one team have a domino effect on other teams.

There are many potential barriers that need to be addressed and this may be part of the problem.  Perhaps if we had key barriers listed for us we could respond appropriately.

Lucky for us this recent Harvard Business School working paper* (pdf) can help out. These researchers were able to come up with a solution to a very difficult teaming problem in a hospital emergency room where members of teams might not know each other or not see each other for months. Team members might be switched out after a few hours of a shift. Yet they had to be immediately effective in a heterogeneous team (doctors of two experience levels and a few nurses) under time pressures and significant stress: saving lives one after another. If researchers could make these teams work better, we project managers should be able to glean some important lessons.

Of particular interest are barriers surmounted by the techniques used. We need to know those team arriers.

Team Obstacle #1:  Members not knowing specific duties in new team or duties not divided appropriately within the team.

Many factors are involved in members getting certain duties - and they aren't necessarily good for your project as are expertise and ability. For example, intimidation and prestige may distort work distribution.

What can you do?  Apply many techniques and controls.

• Make sure team standards and expectations are clear and documented even if they should be obvious. People with different backgrounds, experience and corporate cultures may disagree on the "obvious."
• Include in expectations that the teamis responsible for producing results, thereby supporting a team identity which will counter individual efforts to misuse power and prestige. (More on team self-regulation later.)
• Enable easy escalation of intra-team work distribution issues. Communicate your desire to deal with these early and get them settled.
• Communicate the expectation of mutual accountability, so when individual team members share information needed to complete a task, there is an implicit expectation that both are needed to complete the task and that the task will be completed. This will help mitigate two situations
  (1) where a more "powerful" team member chooses not to assist a less powerful team member
  (2) where a team member working a task finds it difficult to engage a team member to assist with a task because the other is unknown, in a different demographic group,  or  just difficult to communicate with. (More on this barrier later. It's important.)

This will be continued in my next post in a couple of days. There are several other obstacles and they are interrelated, each response helping make the other responses more effective.

*It's pretty interesting and definitely requires another look in the future.

The latest IT news is good for information technology workers in general. The number of IT jobs has increased to more than 4.1 million, the highest ever. 

Unfortunately, in the same high-employment environment, project managers will have a hard time adding staff or finding the needed expertise to get projects completed. Turnover may be higher as well, adding more problems. 

Here's how you and your organization will have to prepare:

• If you are hiring brand new people, allow plenty of time.
• While your at it, budget for more money per hire or contract.
• If you are hiring a large number, consider contractors/consultants who have already hired and have staff ready. Of course, ask for qualifications and interview their candidates.
• Ensure proper processes and procedures are ready for managing contactors/consultants.
• Consider approving more vendors to reduce risk.
• Add more recruiters or engage an entity.
• Consider starting a formal effort to poach critical talent from other organizations.
• And you will need a very good marketing campaign just to sell the advantages for working in your organization. You need a good rep on the street for easier recruiting.
• Today's IT workers want better support. They want to be engaged, so make sure your marketing holds true. You need worker training, coaching, support processes and procedures

This is a long list. Are you ready? Does your organization have some work to so? Are you suffering for talent?

Let us know.

Something else to consider: It might be a project on its own just to fill gaps you have. It may be time to create a business case for such a project.

 Recent events give you a clue to what to expect in the coming months when  it comes to human resource management systems of all kinds. But maybe you can already anticipate how the changes will affect you as a PM for HR tech projects, or how changes will affect how you manage talent and training in your projects.

See if you can choose the most accurate description of the near future:

A.  Large companies will spend more time building out their specialized human capital management software to differentiate themselves with detailed functionality that HR managers are craving and then provide this functionality as software-as-a-service
B.  Industry consolidation will continue so that human capital management companies can more quickly provide broad functionality, if not deep, across a  wide range of HR functions, which is the preference of more of their customers. They will provide these services in a SaaS business model.
C.  Human capital management companies (HCM) will maintain status quo until the market picks up for training, talent management and other HCM services.
D.  It will be like the movie BladeRunner.

If you guessed "C", you may have been following the rule that "the answer is always C", but you would be wrong. Nor are large companies  building out more functionality to differentiate their products as in answer "A".

Recent events, such as the SAP purchase of SuccessFactors which is a cloud-based solution provider, are a clear signal to other HCM software providers must quickly move to the cloud.  Learning and development service providers have been in constant consolidation for a while now. SumTotal Systems (a talent management service provider) recently bought GeoLearning Services, Inc. (e-learning content provider). Look for more merger and acquisition activity as companies try to build a complete suite of HCM services.

In addition, at least one survey tells us that HR managers want a simpler HCM system but with broader capabilities - and they are willing to give up some functionality to get that. And now we know that firms are spending more on learning and development. Bersin and Associates says that training budgets were up 9% in 2011. If you read the Eye often, you will understand the improvements to employee engagement associated with increases in training.

 HR managers would love to have a single SaaS-model super service that covers candidate application to learning to career management. For you as a PM, be ready for the following:

• Projects that involve replacing the services of one of your HR vendors with the same service now provided by another of your vendors as one vendor attempts to grow to take over all the HR services.
• Projects that change HCM functions to a SaaS model and contract, perhaps with a whole new vendor.
• Projects that simply add new HCM services that are now provided by your vendor.
• New ways to manage your project resources, including training, using new capabilities of current HCM vendors.

What sources do you or your recruiters use to find candidates for your project positions? Are you using sources as other recruiters are using them? Or are you unnecessarily restricting where you look?

A new survey gives us an inside look into the world of recruiters to see what to expect in your projects. Some interesting points from this survey help refine our understanding:

• Businesses are showing signs of recovery and will continue to grow.
• Recruiters face two big problems now: Finding good candidates and filling positions quickly enough.
• Where do recruiters find candidates? Candidates are most often coming from job boards telling us that this much-maligned traditional method is still popular. The remaining candidates, however, are found between referrals, corporate web sites, internal candidates, and social networking sites.  Recruiters are using whatever they can to get their candidates. You should too - including using gantthead.com.

More details are in their nifty little diagram below.