Author: jing598fall15

What role you play in a team?

Posted on by jing598fall15

A team is a group that shares responsibility for producing something together. Simply working closely with each other, wearing the same shirts, does not make you a team. Teams are unique because each member cannot complete the work without the work of other members. So the roles of each team member plays are critical for building high-performing team. Especially for dynamic project or new teams, the “role” of the word is more worthy of our attention than “job”. The ability of a role is relatively simple needs. And every successful team needs a mix of skills and roles. Therefore, the project manager should focus on diversifying the team member roles, rather than solely evaluating members on their individual talents. Especially just having a set of individual stars is not the key to build high-performing team.

My former boss is an excellent leader. She is experienced at identify people’s talents, skills, personalities. She can always put the right people in the right position, exert their advantages and compose a diverse team. Usually, she defined the work needed to be completed for the project, recognized the roles and what skills are required, then analyzed the character and team roles of every team member. It is worth mentioning she used FPA (Four-colors Personality Analysis) test as a supplementary tool to better and get a deeper understanding of personality traits and the potential of each subordinate. This approach is according to Dr. Carol Ritberger, a world famous behavioral psychologist and author. FPA states that there are four distinct personality types in the world, and each one has a special color: Red or Orange, motivated by power; Blue, motivated by intimacy; Green, motivated by peace; and Yellow, motivated by fun. Each color with their own unique way of seeing situations, expressing themselves, solving problems, and interacting with people. FPA has been widely used it in recruiting and team management in the companies over the world, it effectively helps manager or employee themselves to find out their personal tendencies, weaknesses, what they need from their peers, how they react to certain situations, areas of personal growth and their ideal work situation. Further, he stresses that human’s character is inborn, people just have one or two main characters and others are influenced by a variety of complicated things, such as grow-up environment, life experience, education and so on. So you can also find a way to develop some personality traits of other colors based on FPA test result.

What color are you

In addition, one of the dimensions for determining whether a team is high-performing is capacity for continued cooperation. That is, team members want to work together in the future after accomplishing a project. They do not feel exhausted from all their resources, but get better at working together, they feel belonging and strive to learn from mistakes or from each other. So they can consistently continue to succeed.

If you are curious about FPA, please check the reference below, it has the test and results analysis.

Reference:

About FPA: https://general-psychology.knoji.com/which-color-personality-are-you-red-blue-green-or-yellow/

Resources Competition in Project Management

Posted on by jing598fall15

I like the case that competition for resources between the project managers at Moss and McAdams Accounting Firm that we were talking last Saturday. It’s such a common problem but difficult to solve.

I was working at Samsung, China’s Mainland before. Almost all of the business departments are based on the project, and each business department has a number of projects at the same time. While carrying out multiple projects, allocating resources between projects has become a very complex task. Resources, especially scarce resources are limited and resulting in project competition. It’s the direct cause of conflict between projects. As the company, they want to invest resources to the most needed place to ensure maximum benefits. Therefore, I think resource management is essential in multi-project management.

We need a lot of resources to implement and complete a project, such as human resources, material resources, equipment resources and information resources. As I worked in the HR Department, so I prefer to talk about the human resource management in project management, especially the human resource contention. Too many talents will be resulting in a waste of resources. Oppositely, not enough talents will lead competition for resources. Our company has a resources pool which is target on the core resources. Because we believe that the management of core resources is the main factor affecting the success of the project, such as technology stars, each project wants technology stars in their group. Just like the case we were talking about at class. Firstly, manage resources pool typically contain the job level and technical expertise of the core employees,  personnel current working condition, and staff selection and assignment system. The staff and assignment system states clearly how to distribute the team members among project. It is prohibited to share team members during A level project or project period that is pretty long. Although the system or policy would play a management role, but the actual project management has a variety of complex situations. So I think the role of effective coordination of functional department is important. Such as management department, human resources department. Secondly, the resources pool should be updated to the  status of the staff periodically to see whether the project goes well and whether need to adjust staff.

Here is an article <How to Manage Key Project Management Resources>.  <http://www.wikihow.com/Manage-Key-Project-Management-Resources> It’s a short article with a video at bottom. It explains the same way how important to plan and get your resources from a resource pool. Not every company has a resources pool, but the project manager should think the same manner to get what you need for the project from all the resources you could find though company.