4.2 Assembling the Team

We’re going to talk about putting your full team together. There are two ways to get your team members on here. One of them, you recruit people, or you assign people. Sometimes, there’s that, sort of water cooler assignment. You need people on your project team. Just walk down the hallway and grab whose ever standing around and looks like they’re not doing much. Those people may or may not wanna be on your team. And, they may or may not wanna see a successful outcome to the project. It’s always best to have people on the project team that wanna see a successful outcome to this, that wanna work on the team. So we ask people, this is the project we’re working on. We need somebody out of this group to work on this project. Is there anyone on this group? Cuz, you have the expertise to do this part of the project we need. Is there anybody in this group that would like to work on this project? And so, people say yes we would like to work on that. So, we choose from those people. We also have to work with their functional managers, because a lot of people have a boss that not you. Typically, as project managers, we don’t have any direct authority over anybody on our project teams. Although, we have are our leadership skills to get people to do things. And, we do have to work with their functional managers, because they’re the ones that have to release them to work on our projects. Might have a kick-off meeting initially, where we bring everybody together, and say, okay, this is the project we’re going to work on. There’s one group that does this on a regular basis. They typically have projects that last about two years in length. Then, they’ll have somebody from the United States, somebody from Europe, they’ll have somebody from Canada. And, they’ll some, have somebody from the Pacific Rim that will be on the project team. They typically get together only once during the project physically. They’ll get together for a kickoff meeting for two days, someplace in the world. Go over what’s going on in the project, how they’re all gonna work together, how they’re gonna communicate. How they’re gonna trade things off, hand things off to another as they’re moving through the project. And then, they typically use video conferencing, and a lot of telephone conferences along the way, as well, but a lot of video conferencing. But, they’ll have a face-to-face kick-off meeting. Now, we can, you know, just introduce all the team members, let them see each other, get to know each other, clarify the project, answer any questions along the way. Any kind of, of work we need to do to get this project kicked off, and do that up front. Now we’re gonna add resources. The best way to put resources on your project is by looking at three things that will come into play here. One is, can the person do this task? Will they do this task? And, are they available during the time frame when we need this task done? So, if we look at this project, we’re going to do a little bit of work in our, in our house and we’re going to remodel the bathroom. And, we’ve laid out all the tasks we need to have done, and we’ve assigned people on here. Because, these people yes, can do this and they’ve all said, yeah, we’d be happy to work on this project. But, we got a little premature. We assigned them before we laid out our schedule, and all of a sudden when we look at it we find uh-oh, we double scheduled people in a few places. What we did with our project is scheduled everybody before we put the times together. We didn’t lay out our schedule yet, and so we didn’t really know when we needed people to do the tasks. Now, we do, and we found out we have some problems. We created these problems ourself. We found out now, that all of a sudden, we have the plumber scheduled in two places at the same time. Sue is scheduled in two places at the same time. Caz is scheduled in two places at the same time. What we have to do when we have our project laid out and our resources assigned, is we have to make sure we don’t have these problems. And, if we find them, then we just fix them. So find the problems, and then fix them. Ideally, we don’t have any of these, but when we do, which we will, we fix them, and there’s a number of ways to do that. Plumber, for example, we’re working with a plumbing contractor. And, all they need to do is send over Nancy and Todd on the same day. They have a lot of plumbers that work there, whole group of plumbers. We just get two of them. Sue, you just say, well, Sue is really good at this custom shower tile design she’s going to do for us, we really want her to do that. But, anybody could hang up that medicine cabinet. Old Gus down the street isn’t doing much these days. He’s a good handyman, he can come down and do that. You just need another body. We talk to Caz, and say hey, Caz, could you just work a couple of a couple of 16 hour days for us? And, Caz says nope, I only work eight hour days, don’t work 16. Don’t care what happens to your project. We go, oh no, what are we going to do now? We want Caz working on this, because he’s an excellent wood worker, and we don’t want to get anybody else in here for that. We want Caz to do all of this. So, we just say, well, Caz, we can just extend the completion date of the project. Get one part of it done, and then just work on the other part. And, we’ll just extend the completion date of the project. So, fix these things any way you can. Find them and fix them. When we talk about putting people on the project, we’re going to talk about who is going to do what. And, there’s a responsibility assignment matrix, an RAM, Ram, or a RACI chart. And typically, you hear this called a RACI chart. And, this comes from the Project Management Institute. It has the person, and it has the activity, and then it has different kinds of things that people will do. Who’s responsible for this? Who’s accountable? Who do we have to consult? And, who do we have to inform? And, here’s an example of one of these things filled out. So, here are all the different activities. Here are all the people across the top. So, our first activity, Sandra, she’s going to be accountable for it. Todd is going to actually be responsible for it. Ramiro, we have to inform Ramiro about this. We inform Sue, and we inform Ed. The second one, Sandra gets informed. Bob is accountable. Ramiro is actually responsible for this. And, we’re going to have to consult Sue and Ed to get information from them, so we can do this, this task properly. So, the Responsibility Assignment Matrix, often called the RACI Chart. Who does what? How do different people get involved with different tasks? You schedule yourself as a resource on a project. You’re going to have changing roles. Sometimes, you’re going to be the project manager. And, when you’re actually doing one of the tasks, you’re going to be one of of those people that has the name on the task, and you’ll be a task doer. When doing a task, it might be very comfortable. It’s kind of nice quiet and easy. Doing this this nice little thing here. Nobody’s running the project, it’s all on its own. It’s on auto pilot. It’s just roaring down the tracks all on its own, and you have to hope that the plan is really good, and you got it laid out well. So, that it can run by itself for a little while. You can work on a task. Just don’t forget to peek your head up once in awhile, and see how that project is going. You have two different roles, and a lot of what you’ll need to do is manage your time really well to do that.