Let's Get Mikey!

[britta]

This is the fourth in my project management blog series. 

Twice now, Life cereal has run a campaign with two brothers determining who will try the new cereal their mom left on the table. Then they have the brilliant idea:“ Let's get Mikey!” Yes, their unsuspecting baby brother who is minding his own business. I feel like this is not too dissimilar to how some organizations chose to put people on their ServiceNow implementation project.  In this blog, I want to show why choosing the right people needs to be carefully considered. 

Consider the following scenario.  Jill is a data analyst and one-third of her job went to another department recently, so she’s looking for more responsibilities. Akash is a great project manager who is in high demand, and he is already running three projects. Bailey has also run projects before even though she is in market research. Should any of them be considered for the project manager role on your project? Read on to decide.   

First, confirm that the person has the right skills. Some companies will assign someone to be a project manager because they are seen as someone who has the time no matter what their skill set is. Without project management skills, that person is set up to fail. If the person is truly the best choice for all other reasons, then make sure they can get the training they need prior to the start of the project, as well as continued mentoring and support.   

Second, choose someone who has adequate time to commit. It’s not unusual for management to select someone who has successfully run projects in the past but is already overallocated. This puts the person in a position where it is difficult for them to run any of their projects effectively. Plus, it sets them up to burn out before projects are completed. 

Third, do you have management approval to use this person for your project? If the person’s manager is not supportive of the project, the manager may not approve the person to work on your project, or worse yet, will commit them but then not actually allow for the required availability. This is where your executive sponsor would need to step in to assist to make sure the manager makes the person available.    

Lastly, have you asked for enough of the person’s time throughout the project? Or did you ask for the minimum amount of time to get approval for the person’s availability? When an issue arises during the project, what if you did not include any buffer time in your estimate? Now the person, or their manager, is pushing back when you ask for more time.    

So, I hope you can see now why neither Jill, Akash, nor Bailey are good choices to be on your project unless:   

• Jill gets project management training and support.  
• Akash transfers at least one project to another project manager.   
• Bailey’s boss approves a realistic estimate for her participation and gives some of her work to someone else for the duration of the project.   

What if, despite doing due diligence, you still have a person on the project who is not performing well in their role?  Often the response is to try to make it work, but that is not recommended because the person might make mistakes or not contribute at all. Then others will be resentful about having to fix the errors or take on the other person’s work. It’s also going to affect your resource planning. The best course of action is to remove a bad fit immediately and look for a backfill.    

Finally, I will touch briefly on another approach some companies take where they have a skeleton crew try to run a project with the mindset that they can just add people later if they need more resources. Despite being written in 1975, The Mythical Man Month still remains the definitive explanation of why adding people at the last minute decelerates your project rather than the opposite due to the time it takes to get them up to speed.   

Like so many aspects of project management, taking the time to do resourcing thoughtfully and realistically at the start of the project will save time later and make the project run more smoothly!