It has been almost ten months since I outlined my last model of Project Management. The importance of having some kind of mental image about projects and Project Management may not come as a surprise. We are long due for an update on how I think everything links together.

Photography by Elvire R.

People Operating In A Group

Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor they laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a “project” is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.

Just to make things easier on our lives, we call the result of all this behavior “the project”. In this sense it is nothing more than an abstraction. If we say “the project is late”, this doesn’t mean that some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than expected; it is the result of the project people working together that wasn’t finished on the time we predicted.

Social Interactions

If we look at the interactions between the stakeholders, some categories may come in handy to divide up the beast we are trying to concur; it is always easier to cut a complex issue into smaller parts when trying to make some sense of it. For this purpose I will use the notion from Ancona and Caldwell who use three dimensions for interactions in teams: the power structure, the task structure and the information structure (source: Constantine, 2001).

The power structure can best be viewed as the hierarchy that exists, it is, if you want, a vertical dimension. The task structure is the structure that consists to perform the actual work; these are interactions that are needed to finish or start a certain task. If the previous dimension is vertical, you can think of this one as horizontal. And the last structure concerning information, are the interactions based upon the exchange of information. This dimension goes from left to right, from top to bottom, so in fact, going all over the place.

The power structure will contain subjects like hierarchical control and planning, the way people are instructed and how the boss is treated back. Concepts like authorization and responsibilities are handled within this dimension. The task structure can be viewed as the actual production chain, it contains all needed interaction to perform task and to create the products. And finally the information structure, subject within this dimension is how, what and when information is provided when the project people are communicating.

Resilience To Cope With Change

In this view a project is a human system working towards a desired goal. However, the project is running within an environment that is changing continuously. The project needs ways to deal with these changes and still keep performing its function, that is, reaching the desired goal. The project needs "resilience".

"Resilience is… the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organize and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning). It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance. A resilient system is forgiving of external shocks. As resilience declines the magnitude of a shock from which it cannot recover gets smaller and smaller. Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility." (source)

Resilience can be found in the individual members of the group, and within the interactions between the members. For the individual adaption is created by having an open and flexible mind, and having the proper social network.

Role Of The Project Manager

A project has a desired goal. It also has borders within it has to operate: constraints. Staying within budget, schedule, quality norms and the like. To be able to do this, the PM monitors the way the project is going and performs interventions if needed. For interventions he has three main tools:

• Strategy: What are the steps taken in the project, and what are the sequence and time frame?
• Organization: How is your project organization constructed?
• Feedback: How is the feedback to the stakeholders on the status and content of products and processes organized?

These areas relate to the three types of interaction: task, power and information. Every intervention has effect on other requirements and constraints. The job of the Project Manager is to facilitate the decision making surrounding those tradeoffs.

And finally, but most importantly, the PM depends on other people to do his job. He needs input from people to know how the project is doing, he needs other people to perform the actual work. It is essential that a PM has good soft skills.