Team Members Commitment and Project Management

Rami is correct. Motivation drives commitment. Without the former, things aren't going to go well. Unless you have force or intimidation of course, but until the day that dictatorships and fascism take over our corporations, we need to motivate with less brutal ways.

Dear Suzy
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion.

Do you think that using the 6 C's (Kiton + Scott) would ensure more than 13% commitment from our team members?

Hello Luis: The impact of team commitment on Project Outcomes and Project Management is enormous. The percentages you shared are staggering. If the team was responsible for emptying a garage and everyone was 100% committed, the work would get done quickly and efficiently. But if only 13% of the team were committed to doing the work, it would take much longer and there would be all kinds of influences and poor behaviors to deal with. Our role as the project manager is to influence and inspire the team to increase commitment from 13% to 100%. So many different things come to mind, but team building becomes important for success. Clear communication with the details team members need to understand the project tasks can move team members closer to full commitment. It also helps if they have trust in us as project managers. If the team already knows you this is easy, but if you are walking into a new team, this can be harder initially. Kiron is right about having strong and trusted relationships already built with functional managers, but sometimes we walk in brand new without that history yet. Kiron was exactly right in his 3C's approach. It takes all 3 of those things to be successful. If it was me, I would brainstorm ways to focus on and reach out to the 63% non-committed team members to help encourage them to move through the stages of change and become committed believers. Then I would work to bring over the unengaged 24%. Luis, I know you will ask me how.....so, these are a few things I would try: (1) Individually find out from each team member how successful they think the project will be and how important they believe their role in project is. (2) From this, I would work to address all concerns and seek to validate each person's important role on the team (3) I would look for ways to incorporate joy into the work and make sure each team members is supported and clearly communicated with about any changes or details needed to do their best work - working diligently to eliminate barriers or obstacles and creating ways to measure individual and team success - these things will increase the energy about reaching milestones and ultimate project success.

Dear Scott
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion.
Interesting what you wrote:
"My three are Collaboration, Cooperation, and Communication. I find that a team founded on these can overcome individual challenges; collaboration builds capability across the team, cooperation improves overall capacity, and communication helps keep everyone committed to the end goals"

How have you been with this approach?
Do you ensure that over 13% are committed?

Not guaranteed surely Luis like many other measures we’ve seen since many years ago. In ideal world if they are well defined within strict metrics without overlapping then sounds nothing could slip off the net but then again true colours is unknown until its known.

Hi Luis,

I would argue that if you don’t put the time into something like what Lori suggests then you won’t have a project to manage for long. Allow me to elaborate: What happens to a project when only 13% if the project team is committed to doing a good job and delivering a successful product? The team will be constantly overworked, faced with quality issues, costs will go up and timelines will be extended from deadlines missed. In my experience that is when a project manager gets replaced.

However, if one were to take the extra time to increase commitment levels and focus the team on working together as a team through driving the Team C’s rather than as a set of individuals then, over time, the Individual C’s will improve across the board and the project will begin to move into the green.

-Scott

Hi Luis,

This approach has worked well for me; with my current project as an example, I have a distributed team of 3 local infrastructure engineers, a core team of 6 (2 UI developers, 2 Azure/backend/infrastructure engineers, a QA analyst and a BA) that are co-located at the customer site with the product owner, and an off-shore team with another back-end and UI developer. Note that only me and the 3 local engineers and the product owners are employees of my company; the rest are outsourced as staff augmentation for this project. None of them are my direct reports.

By establishing the expectation of collaboration, cooperation, and communication from everyone and insisting that, when working on the project we are all on equal standing (e.g. a junior developer in India has just as much input and responsibility as a senior engineer locally) I was able to get a commitment level much higher than other distributed teams I’ve led. Most of the team was 100% committed, a few were partially engaged, and only 1 exhibited traits of being fully disengaged.

Because of the team atmosphere, the co-located group at the customer site was comfortable enough to bring their concerns about the person that was disengaged from the project and I was able to replace them fairly quickly.

Also, by pairing junior team members with more experienced people we were able to improve the capabilities of the less experienced people. As a motivating factor this is key; the senior members are motivated by the respect and increased earning potential by mentoring the junior members, and the junior members are motivated by the availability of =increased knowledge and experience gained from working with more senior engineers. As a result, the overall capacity of the team improved, and the individual commitment was reinforced.

-Scott

Luis, no news here, just reality.

This 13% goes well along with the estimates of David Logan, saying that only 2% of tribes (teams) perform on his top stage 5 (Life is great) and 22% on stage 4 (We are Great) - see tribal leadership by David Logan. 76% of teams are not performing well.

Would be interesting to see how much this contributes to project failures (besides fake business cases), and if significantly, no wonder that still a high amount of projects fail.

So, here we are, project managers.

What are options we have, to make projects successful despite these figures?
- make our teams more CCC? More agile? I bet we cannot achieve that with many more teams.
- make project success less dependent on teams (e.g. by outsourcing them, using AI, using coercive PM)

Any ideas?