Project Managers, leaders and change makers - do you give equal praise even if only a selected few did the real work?

Estimating

Amany Nuseibeh Speaker, Global Leader | Optimal Consulting Sydney, Nsw, Australia

As project managers, leaders and "change makers", we motivate our team members and reward them. What If three members of a five-person team did all the work, do you give those three members proper credit while pointing out that two members of the team did not pull their weight? Do you single out the non-performing team members in a negative light? Or do you give equal praise even though only a selected few did the real work?

Posted: Jul 3, 2018 9:38 AM

Sort By:

< 1 2 3 >

Adrian Carlogea Australia

Jul 14, 2018 5:10 AM

Replying to Amany Nuseibeh

...

Thank you Adrian - As PMs/Change Makers and Leaders, we naturally do not know every speciality that the team members undertake. However, we can measure outputs and quality. In this instance, the two members output is extremely low and lacking in quality, However, as the team pulls together, they fill the gap and accomplish collectively the desired outcome.

Hi Amany it is not always possible to accurately measure the productivity of some workers and if you still try the results may be completely wrong.

How would you measure the productivity of a software developer for instance? Would you count the line of codes he has written, the number of commits, the number of tasks he has completed or perhaps, since many teams use SCRUM, the story points the has delivered?

The above would be non-sense since the fact that a developer has written more lines of code than another or has completed more tasks does not necessarily mean that he is more productive or that he contributed more.

And then there is also a big problem. If the developers know that their productivity is measured on lines of codes or tasks completed then they would definitely compromise on code quality in order to finish faster. A task completed with horrible code can pass acceptance but then it would cause huge problems.

For starters code written at high speed would produce more defects would be less efficient and can cause more frequent crashes. But this is not the big problem. The biggest issue is that such a code would be very hard to maintain, the support team would need much more time to fix defects and if you want to develop new functionality using the code it would take very long time.

At some point developers would have to take the drastic decision to completely refactor the code by re-writing a lot of the it from scratch. Your "productive" developers that wrote the initial code fast and made possible reaching the dead-lines may be the cause of huge problems during the usage of the software and during new projects that bring new functionalities.

Not understanding what has happened in this case many PMs would consider this as a major performance drop. If the PM was a former developer then he would understand the situation.

Posted: Jul 16, 2018 6:48 AM

Cheikh FAYE Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Expert, CEO and owner| Eurêka Technologies Dakar, Senegal

Absolutely no Amany, you are constrained to reward the whole team according to the terms and conditions of the contract defined upfront. It is like in a football match or any other game, we win together or lose together. Never the less what you can do is select those you think are more competent in future projects.You're fully responsible to select the right team to execute and achieve the project, nobody must pay for you for having done a bad choice.

Posted: Jul 16, 2018 8:54 AM

Bala Sripada Hyderabad, Ap, India

I go with Eric

Posted: Jul 17, 2018 1:50 AM

< 1 2 3 >

Please login or join to reply

Project Managers, leaders and change makers - do you give equal praise even if only a selected few did the real work?

Sponsors

Vendor Events

Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data

Newsletters