Best practices promoted by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and other professional organizations provides a context for project planning and management. One of the Knowledge Areas described in the PMI PMBOK is Human Resource Management. Many project managers believe that assembling project teams, delegating work to team members, keeping team members and stakeholders engaged, and other human resource issues are the most critical concerns in planning and managing project work. Effective application of best practices in human resource management drives productivity and ensures that work will be completed according to the project schedule, costs, and deliverable requirements. Human resources management takes into account personnel policies and regulations, along with less tangible aspects of communications and team member motivation. Although the human factor is not readily quantified, we can still take steps towards increasing our understanding of how different sorts of people tend to work together and communicate with each other within the context of an organization--with the overall objective of optimizing productivity and delivering project results according to the plan. That's what this lesson is about.
Regardless of how the scope of a project is defined, it takes people to do the work. In this lesson, we will discuss how to use manpower most efficiently and how to use people most effectively.
By the end of Lesson 4, you should be able to:
See the checklist page for readings, quiz, and assignment work in this Lesson.
If you have any questions or would like to brainstorm ideas, please contact the instructor by phone or email. Also, feel free to communicate with your fellow students via the Discussion Forum or email.
Lesson 4 is one week in length. (See the Calendar for specific due dates.) To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.
Step | Activity | Directions |
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1 | Reading | Lesson 4 online course content |
2 | Reading | Croswell, Chapter 3 (Section 3.4), Chapter 4 (Sections 4.2, 4.4), re-read Chapter 9 (subsection 9.1.2, 9.1.3, 9.6) |
3 | OPTIONAL reading | ISD Project Management White Paper--Who says? [1] |
4 | Quiz 2 | See Canvas Course Calendar for due date. |
5 | Complete Assignment #3: Assemble Project Team | See assignment instructions and Canvas Course Calendar for due date |
6 | Participate in Week 4 Discussion Forum:
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Access Lesson 4 Discussion Forum. Suggested topic - What characteristics are shared by the best workers you personally know in the field of GIS? |
The most interesting, unpredictable, and expensive resource you are likely to work with as a project manager is people. Individuals and their interactions can greatly influence either the success or failure of any project. So, how do you manage them? We will begin by discussing how to develop a human resource plan for a project, and then we will discuss how personnel and interpersonal relationships in an organizational setting can be better understood. A first step would be to organize the individuals who will be working on a project.
A project organizational chart is similar to an organizational chart we discussed in Lesson 2. This document should clearly lay out who reports to whom, based on an individual's role and responsibility within the project. If you are managing the project, you will be at the top of the project organization chart, and ultimately responsible for the success of the project. For projects that involve outside contractors, client organizations normally require those contractors to prepare a project organization chart showing the roles of team members and relationship with client project personnel. Figure 4-1 shows a "standard" project organizational chart showing the main elements that are often included in GIS projects. The box in the middle is the project team, led by an assigned project manager. This structure shows the project's team position in the organization--inside the "program management unit" which may be a formal GIS Office. The project team uses and manages work and products provided by contractors and vendors and communicates with external organizations may have a role in the project (e.g., review and comment on project deliverables). The box in the upper right, "Project Management Office" is an organizational unit which some government and private sector organizations set-up to provide support and oversight in project planning and execution.
Figure 4-2 is an example of a project team structure for a GIS project-in this case, a contracted company providing GIS consulting services for a City government department.
For better or worse, there are generally important inherent differences between the means of influencing employees as a project manager and as an organization manager. You may have limited or no influence over professional incentives for members of your project, such as salary or promotions. Even more challenging, you may not have the final say over time commitments of workers to the project. This underscores the importance of a project charter, where such issues should be clearly laid out for and signed off on by management and sponsors in the organization.
Beginning with a role and responsibility matrix (also called a "resource matrix") and a project organization chart, you can move towards ever more detailed personnel assignments regarding who will accomplish what tasks and when. A project plan generally contains this information in a Work Breakdown Structure, which we will discuss in Lesson 5. In assigning personnel, you may not always have people with the talents or skills you desire within your organization. Training, education, or professional development of existing personnel is one way to overcome this shortfall. Other times, you may need to hire qualified personnel on a temporary or permanent basis. If hiring is required, you will need to clearly outline education, skills, and experience that matches the roles and responsibilities the employee will inherit in the organization.
Many public sector organizations and private companies have established formal GIS position descriptions. Common job titles include "GIS Manager", "Geographic Information Officer (GIO), "GIS Analyst", "Senior GIS Analyst", "GIS Developer/Programmer", "GIS Technician", "GIS Specialist", "GIS Database Administrator", and "GIS Systems Administrator". Croswell (2022), Appendix I has some examples of GIS positions. Also, a Web search using some terms as "GIS position description" will turn up examples used in specific organizations.
Croswell (2022), subsections 4.1 and 9.1 provide a thorough summary of considerations and approaches for staff GIS programs and projects and the organization of team members in projects. Staffing GIS projects can be a challenge particularly if in-house resources are limited. For organizations with a central GIS Office (like a local government enterprise GIS program) a project manager for a new project will often be a staff person in that GIS Office. The project team will usually include some other GIS staff (from the GIS Office) but often may include staff members from user Departments with specific skillsets. Sometimes contracted personnel may also be on the project team.
Once tasks and their timing have been detailed, it is possible to optimize human resources using the tools of resource loading and resource leveling. Resource loading refers to how much of individuals' time is committed to projects during various periods. Optimally, every employee of an organization would have 100% of his or her time allocated during all working hours. In reality, it is very easy for employees to be over-allocated. In many organizations, it can be detrimental in many other ways for employees to be under-allocated, especially if it has an undesired effect on their hours worked and resulting paycheck.
A strategy to optimize personnel allocation is Resource leveling, which resolves conflicts with resources by changing the scheduled times. By having personnel perform tasks on later or earlier dates, managers can take steps toward leveling all personnel at 100% allocation. It should be noted, however, that tasks within a project are often dependent on one another and cannot always be moved arbitrarily without adversely influencing the project schedule. We will discuss this in greater detail in Lesson 5 when we talk about network diagrams and critical paths. Figure 4-3, below, shows an example of the benefits of resource leveling.
In our discussion of resource leveling, we will assume that the rectangles representing worker-days (or worker-weeks, worker-hours, etc) are able to be modifiable in dimensions as long as the area of the resulting worker-week rectangle stays the same. For example, if a task requires 8 worker-weeks to complete, this could be accomplished by one qualified person working on this for 8 weeks, 8 qualified people working on the same task for one concurrent week, or any other combination whose sum is 8 (e.g. 2 workers for 4 weeks, 4 workers for 2 weeks). Although this makes assumptions about how the task can be accomplished, it also provides the project manager with flexibility and potential efficiency when it comes to leveling resources.
Just because a project manager has used all of the tools, discussed in previous section, to manage human resources in the most efficient manner possible, it is no guarantee that the project team will be effective. To be effective, a manager should understand how a team works together, what motivates people, have a detailed understanding of team memer skills and limitations, and develop management skills to efficiently delegate and oversee work.
Much has been made of teamwork and building effective teams. Synergy is a popular concept; it means that the efforts of the team are superior to the sum of what all of the individual efforts would have been. Achieving such a lofty goal is only possible if project team members have a good understanding of themselves, their teammates, and the methods by which they tend to work together.
Team-building activities can be physical in nature and may only be possible to achieve when multiple members of a team work together to achieve a goal, underscoring the very definition of synergy. Unfortunately, we won't be able to build teams this way in this class. What we will be able to do is to attempt to increase our understanding of ourselves and other members of the class.
Tests to gauge personality types and employee motivational factors are sometimes used to help understand work styles, motivational factors, personality characteristics that impact project team member interactions provide a basis for assignment of project roles and task assignments. Two of the most popular of these are the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Social Styles Profile. Meyers-Briggs includes four dimensions of personality, meaning that everyone falls somewhere between the two logical ends of each dimension. The first dimension indicates where people fall on the scale between introverts or extroverts. The second dimension ranges from sensation to intuition, reflecting the way one takes in and process information. The third dimension goes from thinking to feeling, and measures how objectively or subjectively a person tends to judge people or things. The final dimension moves from judgment to perception, and is meant to reflect attitudes towards structures and plans."
The Social Styles Profile defines four zones, with the assumption that most people operate primarily in one of these zones. The zones are based on assertiveness and responsiveness. In this scheme, people are drivers (proactive and task-oriented), expressives (proactive and people-oriented), analyticals (reactive and task-oriented), or amiables (reactive and people-oriented). A GIS project manager may be a driver, but should appreciate and be able to work effectively with the team's analytical GIS Analyst, amiable GIS Technician, and expressive end user. Figure 4-4 below, diagrams how these social styles can be mapped.
Formal testing takes time and often money if an outside service is contracted to administer the tests and process the results. For this reason, it is not frequently used as part of project team member selection. But, in large projects, formal testing should be considered. It can help an organization assemble the right mix of people and provide insights to the project manager for work delegation and team management.
Another useful testing method, designed to gauge key factors that motivate people for certain types of job assignments, is the Kolbe A Index [4]. The Kolbe Corporation states that this test "measures the conative faculty of the mind -- the actions you take that result from your natural instincts, and is the foundational instrument used in Kolbe reports. It validates an individual's natural talents, the instinctive method of operation (M.O.) that enables you to be productive.
You may be wondering if there is a particular personality or motivational type that makes one best suited to be a project manager. The answer is an emphatic "NO". A successful project manager leverages his or her attributes and personal approach in project planning and execution. Project managers do need to be organized, acquire management skills, and become familiar with methodologies that work in a range of project scenarios. A natural introvert may need to learn and apply some communication skills of an extrovert, and the reverse is also true. But most of the key skills and methods of a successful project manager are learned--through appropriate training and application in real-world environments.
An important part of the project manager's job is organizing the work for team members and ensuring that team members are maintaining a high level of productivity--always with a focus on the project objectives. As discussed in Croswell (2022), subsections 4.1.7 and 4.1.8, effective team management has a lot to do with work delegation and maintaining team member morale. In summary, the following best practices make practical sense and should be applied in all GIS projects:
Communication planning is the first process in the effective communication within a team and between a team and other groups. Key to this process is understanding the communication needs of all stakeholders associated with the project.
A communication plan should include a method for creating, formatting, collecting, distributing, filing, and accessing information. This information may be official documents, or it may be a record of a telephone conversation between a client and the consultant. For formal communications, templates that explicitly organize data into a readily recognized format can be helpful. A memo style such as the ones you are using for peer reviews would be such an example. Users familiar with the format know where to look to find who the memo is to, from, its subject and memo details. Although most of this communication occurs during the project, input from stakeholders and analysis of this data during close-out can and often should be another key aspect which would be beneficial to the communication plan.
Informal communication during a project is also important to an effective team. Empathetic listening -- listening with the intent of understanding -- is a skill worth nurturing. It may seem efficient to listen to half a question, cut someone off short, and give a reply, but it is more effective to listen closely to the question, while trying to get at the underlying needs and expectations. Such empathetic listeners often rephrase and repeat the question before answering, prefacing the remark with a phrase like, "What I hear you saying is..." This makes the person aware that the other person is actively listening and allows clarification of the question and its underlying intent before an answer is given.
Tools for communication are numerous, and include letters, contracts, reports, meetings, interviews, surveys, telephones, faxes, pagers, email, text messaging, websites, message boards, weblogs (blogs), wikis, and web conferencing, to name just a few. Each of these communication tools has specific advantages and disadvantages. For example, message boards with threaded email discussions are a tool we have identified as useful for online learning. There may also be templates, best practices, methods as effective, and strategies for the use of all of these communication tools within an organization. Along with subject area knowledge, effective verbal and written communication skills are essential for project managers.
In subsections 3.4 and 9.5, Croswell (2022) discusses concepts and best practices for project communications. He identifies the following types of communication that typically are needed for GIS projects and the specific communication methods and tools used:
All projects should include periodic written status reports--often monthly, but sometimes more frequently depending on the type and timing of the project. The project manager is responsible for this reporting, but information from task leaders or others on the project team is obtained in status report preparation. Some projects may benefit from different types of written status reports--perhaps a detailed format aimed at project team members and other key participants, and a less detailed summary report targeting senior management. The status reports should use a standard format (document template or use of automated project management software). Figure 4-5 shows an example of a project status report template. This gives a summary of all project tasks (the body of the report) and, at the bottom, a summary of key accomplishments (for the reporting period), upcoming milestones, and a listing of project issues or problems to resolve.
One of the best skills that a project manager can develop and apply is meeting management, as underscored by Croswell (2022, subsection 3.4.3). The importance of good meeting organization and management becomes obvious when you consider meeting costs. For instance, the cost of employee time, for a two-hour meeting with 8 people could easily be $1,000 or more--not including an accounting for employee travel time, direct costs (e.g., cost of meeting space), or possible contractor time. It is critically important to get the most out of meetings by applying sound meeting management methods, which include:
Because meetings take time and, in many cases, meeting participants are based in different locations, use of remote, Web-based meeting and collaboration tools is appropriate. The COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020-21, has accelerated already existing trends for use of remote, electronic communication and meeting tools and methods--not to mention telework. It is likely that many such practices adopted during the pandemic will become standard after the pandemic subsides. Tools and services such as Zoom, Goto Meeting, Webex, Google Docs, Adobe Connect, and others support voice and video connection as well as common views (and sometimes joint editing) of documents and other project materials.
Submittal: See Canvas Calendar for Submittal Date
Target Word Count: 600-1500 words (this is just a target to provide a general idea on level of detail)
Total Points: 40 points - see rubric for specific details
For Assignment #3, you are the project manager for the GIS contractor chosen to carry out the City of Metropolis Geodatabase Design and Development project. You will assemble a project team (the contractor's project team) for the City of Metropolis Geodatabase Development Project. You can assume that your company has already been selected by the City—that is, your company and other companies have submitted proposals in response to the City’s RFP and your proposal was determined to be the most responsive and was formally selected to do the work. Now you, as the contractor’s project manager, have been asked by the City’s project manager (Lucille Geodata) to present information about your project team—the people and their roles for the project.
Take a look at the City of Metropolis RFP [5]—particularly the summary of major work elements (subsection 1.2) and expectations on project team roles in 2.3.5. Use the material that you have reviewed in this lesson to identify team members with positions and skills needed to carry out the project work. Assume that the necessary staff are already employees of your firm and are available to work on this project. Since you are taking the role of the contracted company, you should make up a company name and refer to this in your assignment. This assignment identifies and describes members of the contractor's team, NOT any of the City's project team members.
The content for this Assignment consists of an introductory explanation and background of the project. This project introduction does not need to be lengthy but should contain enough detail to explain the project background (based on City RFP), summary of project scope and deliverables, and overview of the responsibilities of the City Team and the contractor. it is a good idea to put in a list and brief description of all project deliverables (from the RFP). In other words, provide enough detail to provide context to understand the project work and the role of people in contractor team table. Then, prepare a table that presents a summary of the contractor’s (your company’s) project team members (not the City’s project team). Content in this table should include:
*Select hourly billable rates to the best of your ability. In practice, billable rates, which cover all company employee compensation and overhead, do vary by company, region of the country, and type of project. Assume that the project manager rate will be in the range of $100 to $175 per hour and the field data collection personnel will be about $40 to $60 per hour. Include one field data collection person who will oversee and organize the field work as well as participate in the field data collection. Rates for other project roles (e.g., database design, application development) will fall between these ranges.
You should include a Cover Page with prominent title and all necessary information identifying the course, assignment, author, and date. The main title of the document should be "CONTRACTOR PROJECT TEAM". The Cover Page should also reference "City of Metropolis" and the full project name. At the bottom of the Cover Page (right side is best), include the course name and number, assignment number, your name, and date.
NOTE: Include a made-up name for your company. Remember that your company has already been selected by the City. The contractor team information does not need to include qualifications or marketing information for your team--just a clear description of role and duties in the project for each team members.
There is no single ideal size for the project team. The number of people on the team and their mix of skills and roles needs to be adequate to carry out all work on the project in a reasonable period of time. As a general rule, it is best to keep the team as small as possible, as long as it has enough people with management and technical skills and clearly defined roles to perform the work. For a project like this, a team size of about 6 to 10 people is appropriate. Some team members may have multiple roles.
Refer to the grading rubric below for guidelines on expected content and format.
See the Canvas Calendar for the submittal date. Grading information and the grading rubric is below.
This assignment is worth 40 points. The grading approach is explained in the table below.
The instructor may deduct points if the Assignment is turned in late, unless a late submittal has been approved by the Instructor prior to the Assignment submittal date.
Grading Category | Basis for Scoring | Total Possible Points |
Point Award Explanation |
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A. Appropriateness of Identified positions |
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12 |
|
B. Overall Document Organization |
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8 |
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C. Quality/Clarity of Writing | Submittal includes an introduction providing background and context for the project team table. Content in the introduction and in the table shows:
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12 |
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D. Format Quality | Well-formatted text and table addressing the following:
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8 |
|
Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog871/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog871/files/papers/%235-ISD%20Project%20Management%20Whitepaper%20Series-Who%20says.pdf
[2] https://www.urisa.org/clientuploads/directory/Documents/Books%20and%20Quick%20Study/URISA2017_GISSalary%20SurveyExecSummary.pdf
[3] https://www.urisa.org/clientuploads/directory/Documents/Books%20and%20Quick%20Study/model_job_descriptions.pdf
[4] http://www.kolbe.com
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog871/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog871/files/Metropolis_RFP/Metropolis_RFP_Geodatabase_Development_Spring_2024.docx