Online PMP Training Material for PMP Exam - Human Resources Management Knowledge Area

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Human Resource Management

Chapter 9


Chapter 9Objectives

Understand the different Human Resource Management Processes

Their Inputs, Tools and Techniques, Outputs

This chapter entails one to understand the various Human Resource Management aspects required to ensure the desired Project work is accomplished.

Driving the project towards the desired outcome while getting the project activities are completed to make the project successful!


HR Management includes the processes to ensure the required resources are planned, acquired, evolved and managed to deliver the project deliverables inline with the objectives.

Ensuring the resources(project staff) are included in the early engagement of the project would increase their project commitment.

Project Management team is responsible for all leadership activities such as Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring, Controlling and Closing.

Knowledge Area: Human Resource Management


There are 4 HR Management processes, namely:

1.Plan HR ManagementIdentification of the HR Personnel required to be on the project, Engaging them on the project and finally release them once their role has ended in project

2.Acquire Project TeamConfirmation of required resource availability for the project to be executed

3.Develop Project TeamEnsuring the project staff are capable to deliver the project by up-skilling the staff, training, coaching and ensuring the effective communication and motivation across the project staff to achieve the project objectives.

4.Manage Project TeamContinuous engagement of the staff to ensure the team understands their importance to the project, how their work has impact on the project by providing them continuous feedback, resolve any conflicts and recognize/reward accordingly to keep the upbeat in the team.

Knowledge Area: Human Resource Management


9.1 Plan Human Resource Management

Inputs

• Project Management Plan

• Activity Resource Requirements

• Enterprise Environmental Factors

• Organizational Process Assets

Tools & Techniques

• Organization Charts and Positions Descriptions

• Networking• Organization Theory• Expert Judgment• Meetings

Outputs

• HR Management Plan

•Integration•Develop Project Management Plan

•Scope•Plan Scope Management•Collect Requirements•Define Scope•Create WBS

•Time•Plan Schedule Management•Define Activities•Sequence Activities•Estimate Activity Resources•Estimate Activity Duration•Develop Schedule

•Cost•Plan Cost Management•Estimate Costs•Determine Budget

•Quality•Plan Quality Management

•Human Resource•Plan HR Management

•Communications•Plan Communications Management

•Risk•Plan Risk Management•Identify Risks•Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis•Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis•Plan Risk Responses

•Procurement•Plan Procurement Management

•Stakeholder•Plan Stakeholder Management

Planning Process

Process of identifying and documenting the project roles, responsibilities, required skills, reporting relationships, and creating a staffing management plan.

Benefits include the establishment of Project roles and responsibilities, organization charts, staffing management plan(includes the acquisition, management, transition and release of resources), identification of training needs, team building strategies, plan for recognition and rewards.

Effective HR planning ensures the project critical resources are planned well and utilized in manner which is collaborative to other projects in the organization and minimized competing for the same resources.


Most of the organization charts are intended to provide the complete ambiguity less understanding of the project roles and responsibilities at various levels such as at high level(graphical tree structure) and low level which includes the text description along with a mix and match of organization.

Hierarchical Type ChartsThese charts typically represent information in a graphical manner with a top down approach with positions and departments.

OBS (Organization Breakdown Structure) defines the Organizational units, project teams structured at very high level.

RBS (Resource Breakdown Structure) defines the resources in the category and resource type. Usually RBS can be considered as a sub-component of OBS, however, it can exist as standalone to the project as well.

RBS benefits the project management team with the aid of connecting these resources cost to the tracking of project costs.

Matrix Based ChartsA RAM (Responsibility Assignment Matrix) depicts how the resources or groups are assigned to the work packages.

A common example of RAM is RACI Chart. RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consult, Inform)

RACI chart is used to define clear demarcations of the behaviors expected from resources for each individual activity. This is especially helpful when the teams are internally and externally split working organizations.

Text Oriented Formats. Project Management Team has to ensure the clear and detailed descriptions of the individual roles and responsibilities to be performed and publish them for ready references.

Organization Charts & Position Descriptions


Networking is the way people connect with each other and evolve relationships which play a crucial importance in project management team dynamics to understand the underlying political and interpersonal factors.

Few of the most popular networking activities include lunch meetings, coffee breaks, events, formal and informal gatherings, meetings, social networking connections, friend of friend, email correspondence and so on.

In the essence of project management, networking helps build that interpersonal connections to influence the outcomes of the work being accomplished as part of the project.

Henry Ford (who is he?) once implemented an innovative design by modifying factory production and creating an assembly line. This setup is still being used by Ford to make it easier for company to Produce effectively and efficiently across the Ford Motor.

Behavioral information about the organizational units, teams and people in the organization can help improve the effectiveness of the HR Management Plan.

Identification of the recurring patterns and themes in the organization supplement readily project management plan to develop efficiencies by adopting patterns of response by individual groups, teams and units.

Networking Organization Theory


Maslow’s

Hierarchy of Needs Theory

Starts from Lower level of needs to progress gradually upwards to Highest level of needs. Employees are at the peak of motivation at the tip of the pyramid.

Physiological → Safety → Social → Self-Esteem → Self-Actualization

Herzberg’s

Motivation & Hygiene Theory

Motivation comes from: Intrinsic Conditions of the Job such as Professional & Personal Growth, Achievement, Recognition.

Hygiene factors which are externally motivating beyond the job itself such as Compensation, Company Policies, Supervisor Behavior & Closeness to Employee, Peer Behavior & Team Bonding

Victor Vroom’s

Expectancy Theory

Employees are motivated when they understand that their superior job performance will yield to their superior organizational rewards.

McGregor’s

X & Y Theory

X Theory suggests people are lazy, don’t want to work and needs to be micro managed

Y Theory suggests people are self motivated and need not be managed

Z Theory (derivative of Y) suggests people are at peak motivation with a lifetime career and a happy work-life balance with overall well being of the employee

McClelland’s

Need for AchievementTheory

Low Need for AchievementPeople pick the easy tasks to minimize the risk of failure ORPeople pick the extremely difficult tasks to fail themselves but avoid

embarrassmentHigh Need for Achievement

People pick the moderately challenging tasks to ensure they are challenged but they could accomplish and well within their reach

Self-ActualizationSelf-Esteem

SocialSafety

Physiological

Orga

nizat

ional

Theo

ries

to M

otiva

tion


9.2 Acquire Project Team

Inputs

• Human Resources Management Plan

• Enterprise Environmental Factors

• Organizational Process Assets

Tools & Techniques

• Pre-assignment• Negotiation• Acquisition• Virtual Teams• Multi Criteria Decision

Analysis

Outputs

• Project Staff Assignments• Resource Calendars• Project Management Plan

Updates

•Integration•Direct and Manage Project Work

•Scope•Time•Cost•Quality•Perform Quality Assurance

•Human Resource•Acquire Project Team•Develop Project Team•Manage Project Team

•Communications•Manage Communications

•Risk•Procurement•Conduct Procurements

•Stakeholder•Manage Stakeholder Engagement

Executing Process Ensuring the Project Team Members are allocated to work on the project for the project duration is the main objective of the Acquire Project Team.

Key Benefits include we have a ready team which is selected(based on skill, cost, availability…) for the project team to accomplish the work.

Team members Selection is at times an organizational decision to hire from a subcontractor pool or from a different business unit. Hence it may not be always in the hands of project team to select team members.

In all cases the project management team is responsible for acquiring the resources and engaging them on the project work.

Non availability of the intended resources for the project work may need to undergo various options, like replacement, alternate solutions, scheduling change and in extreme situations project being halted or cancelled permanently.

Project Management team is responsible to bring out such risks and communicate to the stakeholders appropriately.


Pre-AssignmentIn some cases, the project staff are pre-selected for a particular purpose of the project inception. These staff are Pre-Assigned due to their special skills or knowledge about the project upfront.

Allocating key resources at the Project beginning stage ensures Project moves at a good rate. Multitasking by key resources is quite common.

Staff allocation on project is one of the critical activity a project management team performs. Allocation of right set of resources for the job ensures the work is efficiently and effectively done in quality manner.

In order to ensure the right set of resources, project management team often negotiates with functional managers, procurement team, vendors, contractors, suppliers.

Allocation of scarce resources who are highly skilled is always a negotiation between the project manager and functional manager.

Negotiation


AcquisitionWherever the work cannot be accomplished with internal resources, external parties are engaged to provide these resources for completion of work.

Bringing variety of roles of professionals working on the project ensures it is taken care for delivery of final product.

We need everyone. Not just SME’s alone.

Teams often comprise of people who are not directly working on the job location and they may be working from elsewhere to accomplish the project work.

Indeed the advancement in technology has ensured the major portions of work is being delivered through virtual remote teams or locations.

Though Virtual Team concept provides multiple benefits in terms of cost, acquisition of specialized resources and access to quantity of resources.

Downsides being cultural differences, isolated team not understanding requirements, missing natural cohesiveness in the team. And intensive communications overhead.

Virtual Teams


9.3 Develop Project Team

Inputs

•HR Management Plan•Project Staff Assignments•Resource Calendars

Tools & Techniques

•Interpersonal Skills•Training•Team Building Activities•Ground Rules•Colocation•Recognition And Rewards•Personnel Assessment Tools

Outputs

•Team Performance Assessments

•Enterprise Environmental Factors Updates







Executing Process Develop Project Team ensures that the performing project team is improved in terms of their capabilities, skills, knowledge and are motivated to perform at their peak levels.

Key Benefit of this process is it provides a motivated team staff to deliver project objectives inline with the expectations. This process also reduces the staff turnover rate.

Fostering team work, Rewards and Recognition, Providing challenges and Opportunities are few of the key HR activities a project manager may need to perform to ensure the team is performing well.

Open communication, Building trust and transparency, managing conflicts in a constructive manner are few actions project manager can perform to ensure the high performance of the team.


Resource Calendars indicates the availability of the resources(HR, Material, Equipment) from when to when and whether they are available for the project duration or activity duration, including the availability in various geographical location of the resource.

Resource Calendars aid to achieve further reliability in the estimation since it is based on the understanding of the resource availability, schedule constraints, time zone, work hours, vacation, local holidays, other commitments and so on.

Additionally, in case of contracted resources, these resource calendars may include the special pricing for any off peak periods, which project manager may want to exploit.

Similarly, if there are resource groups, whether the quantity and availability of resources expected is active on those particular dates for execution. Resource preparedness levels and so on can be further defined in resource calendars.

Resource Calendars


Project Manager’s Interpersonal skills are very helpful to be applied across the course of the project to gain the desired outcomes from conversations and engagements with team.

LeadershipProject Manager may adopt different leadership hats depending on the situation/need.

Authoritarian (Close Supervision)Paternalistic (Caretaker)Democratic (Shared Decision Making)Laissez-Faire (Delegate & Wash Hands) – Let them doTransactional (Rewards & Punishments)Transformational (Transform Followers Thinking)

The most important aspect which Project Manager should ensure is to showcase the vision of the project and inspire team to deliver / work towards it.

InfluencingProject manager is supposed to exert influence over the topic of interests and resources to achieve project objectives. How, when, Who, Why to influence depends.

Decision MakingProject Manager has to make critical decisions at various intersections of the project and how effectively these decisions are made and based on what assumptions or data decides on the decisions evolved.

Interpersonal Skills


Interpersonal SkillsThese are the behavioral aspects of how a team member interacts with another or in a group dynamic. Interaction is at various levels including communication, influencing, motivating, articulation and conflict resolution.

Having team members with superior interpersonal skills often results in improved team bonding, cohesiveness and discovery of undiscovered work tasks and objectives of the project.


Team members supposed to perform the project activities should be capable and skilled to ensure the proper and quality aspect of the delivery.

In most cases, any gaps in capabilities or skills, these are planned by organized scheduled trainings. Though in some cases these gaps are identified in later stages and may result in ad-hoc unplanned trainings.

Trainings may be formal or informal & individual or group & internal or external event based on project need.

Training


Teams working from remote locations often do not get a chance to interact in person and may lead to communication-misunderstanding-conflict gaps.

In order to ensure the teams work as cohesive group and effectively with none of the mentioned symptoms, many a team building activities could be facilitated.

Activities may include team discussions, meetings, informal lunches, get-togethers, organized events and or professionally run offsite events.

Team Development may go through Tuckman Ladder’s five stages in either direction:

Team Building Activities• Team formation by understanding

individual roles and responsibilities

1. Forming

• Team starts working on deliverables with each other, any gaps between members arise conflicts

2. Storming

• Members start to trust each other and adjust behaviors to deliver the project objectives

3. Norming

• Teams start to work collaboratively and with interdependence for smooth and effective delivery

4. Performing

• Team starts completion of work effectively & moves on to next projects, end of project

5. Adjourning


Ground Rules

In order to ensure all team members share the same underlying behavior or aspects towards project delivery, there are certain ground rules which need to be established, communicated and published across the teams.

These are the anticipated behaviors and values of team members expected during the course of the project delivery.

Examples include the Confidentiality of the Information Sharing, Meeting Rules, Dress Codes, Ethical Practices…

Moving all the project responsible teams to sit in an closer locations such that the face to face and interactions are more frequent than wait and watch interactions bring additional efficiency to deliver the objectives known as Collocation. Also known as Tight Matrix.

Often the global distribution of teams and spread across geographies, it may be impractical to ensure collocation. In such a situation based on the critical timeframe of the project it may be easier to have them collocated for shorter durations.

Also, this model may be best suited when there is a specific need to be met and requires specialists to sit together in a War room to achieve a critical end objective.

Collocation

Hey! Stop


A war room is a meeting room for the purpose of strategizing and deployment of action plans/measures on the specific intervals of project to accomplish a quick achievement/milestone.

Entire set of individuals responsible to deliver in this achievement / milestone are available to each other to answer questions, discuss outstanding issues and respond with swift actions.

In addition, they may discuss the resources needed such as man power, the budget, the timeline and possible challenges to be faced and what can be done about the pitfalls which may occur.

To aid the entire process, valuable visual information such as budget, time table and project information may also be made available as charts in the war room.

War Room


Recognition and RewardsPeople working on the project need to be continuously recognized and rewarded for their best work towards accomplishment of the Project work.

Recognition and rewards should be planned at continuous intervals and implemented to boost the team morale.

Recognition for their good work and providing them new growth opportunities, challenges are the intangible benefits which project manager may plan well in advance.

Rewards may be monetary and non-monetary and this can again be planned upfront during the planning.

These tools assist project manager to understand the aspirations of the project team members, their preferences and similar aspects.

Using this information project management team can gain most by aligning them in line with the project objectives.

Personnel Assessment Tools

Assess

AnalyzeAct


Implementation of various team development activities ensure the team makes effective and efficient progress.

At the same time it is natural to see which tools have caused the major team performance improvements and are assessed over a period of time.

Ensuring the team performance is at the peak levels increase the confidence levels of delivery of the project objectives.

High performance teams are characterized by meeting the project objectives (scope, time, cost, quality).

Where ever the shortfalls are identified for achieving the peak team performance levels, relevant actions have to be defined by the project management team and circulated to the actionable owners.

Team Performance Assessments

Outstanding Exceeds Meets Improve Poor


9.4 Manage Project Team

Inputs

•HR Management Plan•Project Staff Assignments•Team Performance Assessments

•Issue Log•Work Performance Reports•Organizational Process Assets

Tools & Techniques

•Observation And Conversation

•Project Performance Appraisals

•Conflict Management•Interpersonal Skills

Outputs

•Change Requests•Project Management Plan Updates

•Project Document Updates•Enterprise Environmental Factors Updates

•Organizational Process Assets Updates







Executing Process It is the process of managing the project team performance, providing them required support & feedback, and adopt suitable team changes as required.

Key benefit of this process is that it changes the team behavior, manages conflict, resolve issues, and provide performance appraisals.

As part of the process it is evident to provide continuous feedback for better performance of team members, recognize team for their extraordinary work and keep the momentum upbeat.

Formal Appraisals and Recognitions for Challenging work performed with the respective functional managers is also critical to the future success and performance of the team members.

Project managers should ensure the performance is documented and recorded after formal discussions with the team members individually.

Team management involves special skills such as Team Leadership, Team Building, Team Motivation, Team Communication, Team Conflict Management and Negotiation.


Comparison of current work performance to the planned work performance gives vital feedback to the forecasted work performance.

Based on the forecasted work performance, corrective and preventive actions for the future course of action on the human resources could be planned for control.

Areas of work which may be compared include Schedule, Cost, Scope and Quality aspects.

Work Performance Reports


Observation and Conversation

Project Management Team has to have continuous observation of the work in progress and delivered by the team members.

In addition, to that having regular conversations to discover the topics which may be harnessed for the benefit of the project delivery.

Project Team performance appraisals boost the team morale and increase the engagement of the team on the project.

Performance may be appraised on various factors and having positive and constructive feedback increases the team members performance significantly.

Having team members formally appraised and providing them improvement plans ensure they adopt those and follow the course of the project in the desired manner and behavior.

Project Performance Appraisals


Conflicts arise due to many reasons. Many or majority of the conflicts in the Projects are due to some of the key aspects of missing elements. Such as:

New / Missing /

Conflicting Scope

On the team, major conflicts are due to the scope aspects

being not represented or

guided correctly in the

first place.

Unrealistic Schedule/ Sequencin

gMany a times, the estimates become the actual plan

without being checked for the actual

reality. Also not so correct

sequencing of the activities

lead to conflicts in activities.

Project Priorities

When projects are not defined

as per priorities, it

become evident that

stakeholders/project

manager/shared resources encounter

many ambiguities.

Unattainable Cost / Mislead

ProcurementsCost of

activities especially outsourced

which have not been set right

expectations of performance

lead to unwanted

discussions and debates for conflicts.

Personalities /Human Resources

Project is a mix of team

members effort and

collaboration with each other with their own

personalities based work

accomplished.

Why does Conflicts arise?


It is natural to have conflicts when people work with each other, have different view points for the benefit of project.

How best, conflicts could be managed and reduced involve setting up ground rules, effective communication, clarity on the project vision and best practices adopted across project.

Ensuring conflicts are resolved builds trust and engagement levels among parties for further collaboration + commitment. Conflicts may be resolved with following techniques:

Withdraw / Avoid

• Avoiding the point of conflict ensures the conflict resolution takes least priority and it may/not actually resolve the conflict naturally over the course of period. Lose-Lose Situation.

Smooth / Accommodate

• In some cases, it may be beneficial to openly talk about the points agreed and some points which are not agreed. This builds transparency & gains others trust. At the same time, the issue itself is not addressed directly. Lose-Lose Situation.

Compromise / Reconcile

• Adjustments to the view points ensure both the parties needs are partially met and brings new comfort level for the work to proceed for desired results. However each party looses something. Lose-Lose Situation.

Conflict Management


Force / Direct

• Some view points are forced upon the other party to agree upon. “Just listen to what I say”. This is a win-lose situation.

Collaborate / Problem

Solve

• Win-Win situation. Ensure each point of conflict is picked up and discussed in detail and why reasons so that both parties understand openly the view points and agree to the forward approach with consensus.

Conflict Management


Chapter 9 - Debrief


THIS BRINGS TO “HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT” COMPLETION.

From what we have understood so far is:

4 Human Resource Management Knowledge Area Processes

Identified their Inputs, Tools & Techniques, Outputs

Chapter 9


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Online PMP Training Material for PMP Exam - Human Resources Management Knowledge Area