Chapter Six: Project Human Resources Management
6.1. Introduction
Activity
•Why is managing humans so difficult task in a project?
•Discuss if encouragement is important in project management?
Many corporate executives have said, “People are our most important asset.” People determine the
success and failure of organizations and projects. Most project managers agree that managing
human resources effectively is one of the toughest challenges they face.
6.2. What is Project Human Resources Management?
Project human resource management includes the processes required to make the most effective
use of the people involved with a project. Human resource management includes all project
stakeholders: sponsors, customers, project team members, support staff, suppliers supporting the
project, and so on. Human resource management includes the following four processes:
1. Planning human resource management involves identifying and documenting project
roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships. The main output of this process is a
human resource plan.
2. Acquiring the project team involves assigning the needed personnel to work on the
project. Resource assignment and resource loading is an essential point. Resource loading
refers to the number of individual resources that an existing schedule requires during
specific time periods. Resource loading helps project managers understand the demands of
a project on the organization’s resources and on individual people’s schedules. Key outputs
of this process are project staff assignments, resource calendars, and project management
plan updates.
3. Developing the project team involves building individual and group skills to enhance
project performance. Team-building skills are often a challenge for many project managers.
The main outputs of this process are team performance assessments and enterprise
environmental factors updates.
4. Managing the project team involves tracking team member performance, motivating
team members, providing timely feedback, resolving issues and conflicts, and coordinating
changes to help enhance project performance. Outputs of this process include change
requests, project management plan updates, project document updates, enterprise
environmental factors updates, and organizational process assets updates.
6.3. Managing People
Industrial-organizational psychologists and management theorists have devoted extensive research
and thought to the field of managing people at work. Psychosocial issues that affect how people
work and how well they work include motivation, influence and power, and effectiveness.
A. Motivational Theory
Psychologists, managers, coworkers, teachers, parents, and most people in general still struggle to
understand what motivates people to do what they do. Intrinsic motivation causes people to
participate in an activity for their own enjoyment.
Example:
Some people love to read, write, or play an instrument because it makes them feel good.
Extrinsic motivation causes people to do something for a reward or to avoid a penalty.
Example:
Some young children would prefer not to play an instrument, but they do because they receive a
reward or avoid punishment for doing so. Why do some people require no external motivation to
produce high-quality work while others require significant external motivation to perform routine
tasks? Why can’t you get someone who is extremely productive at work to do simple tasks at
home?
B. Motivation-Hygiene Theory
This considers the hygiene that causes motivations in It Projects.
Figure 6-1 motivation-hygiene theory
C. Acquired-Needs Theory
A person’s specific needs are acquired or learned over time and shaped by life experiences. The
main categories of acquired needs include achievement, affiliation, and power. Normally, one or
two of these needs are dominant in people.
i. Achievement – people who have a high need for achievement seek to excel, and tend to avoid
both low-risk and high-risk situations to improve their chances of achieving something
worthwhile. Achievers need regular feedback and often prefer to work alone or with other high
achievers.
ii. Affiliation – people with a high need for affiliation desire harmonious relationships with other
people and need to feel accepted by others. They tend to conform to the norms of their work group
and prefer work that involves significant personal interaction. Managers should try to create a
cooperative work environment to meet the needs of people with a high need for affiliation.
iii. Power – people with a need for power desire either personal power or institutional power.
People who need personal power want to direct others and can be seen as bossy. People who need
institutional power or social power want to organize others to further the goals of the organization.
Management should provide such employees with the opportunity to manage others, emphasizing
the importance of meeting organizational goals.
6.4. Organizational Planning
An organizational plan is basically a “to-do” list for an organization. It lists out the plan of work,
programs, and organizational growth over a period of time – six months, a year, five years. They
can be pretty simple to create and use. Writing a plan can just mean getting a clear list of the types
of work that need to be done, the tasks involved, who is responsible for them, and when they will
be done.
• Preparing for organizational planning.
• Identifying the project interfaces (organizational interfaces, technical interfaces, and
interpersonal interfaces).
• Identifying the staffing requirements.
• Identifying the project constraints.
• Completing organizational planning.
• Relying on templates
• Applying human resource practices
• Examining organizational planning results
• Creating the role and responsibility assignments
• Creating a staffing management plan
6.5. Issues in Project Staff Acquisition and Team Development
A group is – a collection of people who come together because they share something in common.
What they share could be as insignificant as a desire to get on the next bus that will arrive at a
particular stop. A team, however, is – a group of people who share a common name, mission,
history, set of goals or objectives, and expectations. A strategy that can help groups develop into
real teams is teambuilding, – the process needed to create, maintain, and enrich the development
of a group of people into a cohesive unit. There are five critical issues identified in this outline.
i. Cohesiveness
This term refers to the attractiveness of group membership. Groups are cohesive to the extent that
membership in them is positively valued, and members are drawn toward the group. In task-
oriented (e.g., learning or project) groups, the concept can be differentiated into two sub concepts:
social cohesiveness and task cohesiveness. Social cohesiveness refers to the bonds of interpersonal
attraction that link group members. Task cohesiveness refers to the way in which skills and abilities
of the group members mesh to allow optimal performance.
ii. Roles and Norms
All groups develop a set of roles and norms over time, whether or not these are explicitly discussed.
Norms are the rules governing the behavior of group members. The use of explicitly defined roles
enables the group to cope effectively with the requirements of the task. The roles and norms that
govern cooperative learning groups are often imposed by the instructor, but that does not preclude
a teambuilding exercise in which those roles and norms, as well as some that are specific to a
group, are discussed and accepted.
iii. Communication
Effective interpersonal communication is vital to the smooth functioning of any task group.
iv. Goal Specification
It is very important for group members to have common goals for group achievement, as well as
to communicate clearly about individual goals they may have.
v. Interdependence
This is the issue of how each team member ‘s success is determined, at least in part, by the success
of the other members.