Best Practices_ Managing People_ Secrets to Leading for New Managers - Barry Silverstein [19]
Don’t allow conflicts to continue if you believe they are affecting the team’s effectiveness.
Do get out of the way if your team members already accept individual responsibility for the team’s success.
Don’t micromanage a team that already functions effectively.
Still, self-managed teams can accomplish a great deal. If you put into practice the strategies and techniques discussed earlier, it is quite possible to build a self-managed team. Consider yourself lucky if you do. When a self-managed team becomes truly successful, an interesting thing happens: the manager becomes not so much a supervisor as a coach. Your role is no less important, but it is certainly different.
The best course of action, when possible, is to get out of the way and let the team succeed. Be available to answer questions and offer guidance. Be a sounding board. Facilitate decision-making when the need arises. Monitor progress.
Don’t completely let go of the rudder, but don’t overmanage your team if it is capable of getting the work done on its own. After all, it is a tribute to you as a manager when such an effective team hits its stride.
Essential Skill III Managing Projects
“How do you know when your project measures up? Each week, ask, “Will we be bragging about this project five years from now? Never let a project go dreary on you.”
—Tom Peters
Managing projects takes the skills you acquire managing people and teams and applies them to a deliverable. A project is any deliverable—a report, a presentation, a strategic plan, a manufactured product—for which you have management responsibility.
Typically, managing a project means managing three components—resources, money, and time—that are separate but interdependent and, taken together, comprise the scope of the project.
THE PROJECT’S SCOPE
In effect, the scope of the project is what you need to accomplish with the resources, money, and time you have available. Most project management experts say that properly defining the scope of the project at the outset is the ingredient most critical to its success.
To define the scope, you need to fully understand the nature of the project, its objective, and what you think will be required to get it done. Can the project legitimately be accomplished with the available resources, money, and time? What is the budget? The delivery date? Are there elements of the project that you believe should be outside the project’s scope? A project’s scope is dynamic—it should change if the project is modified along the way.
POWER POINTS
WHAT’S A PROJECT?
A project is any deliverable for which you have management responsibility. The three critical elements are:
Resources–People, equipment, physical material, outside services
Money–Funds allocated for the project, anticipated profit
Time–How long it takes to reach each milestone and to complete the project overall
CASE FILE
STRONG PLANS ARE TOP PERFORMERS
For Washington Group International, a large engineering consulting firm, weak project management is not an option. The company runs projects in 30 countries at any given time—as many as 400 to 500 jobs at once.
Not only does repeat business depend on successful execution of every project, but so do the firm’s earnings: Revenues from most of the contracts are linked to performance. Consequently, successful execution of every project has a direct impact on the bottom line.
With this impetus, the firm has learned that projects with a well-defined planning process and strong execution plans outperform projects with weaker plans by five to one. Strong project management skills are a firm value and part of its corporate culture. As a result, about 75 percent of the firm’s jobs meet or exceed targeted performance due to project management, according to Tom Zarges, executive vice president of operations.
SOURCE: “Beyond the Bottom Line” by Marla Schulman, PM Network (January 2005).
THE BOTTOM LINE
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
The more mature an organization’s project management practices, the more likely the organization