The Implications of Leadership in a Project - Assignment Example

ABSTRACT Project managers face a profession coupled with a number of unique challenges. Tasked with the successful implementation of their project, these leaders are given a mandate to operate their project teams as de facto profit centers for the organization as a whole. One key skill that successful project leaders need to master is the ability to attune their temporal skills to the nature of the work they are called upon to perform. Different aspects of their duties require appropriate and varying time orientations. This paper discusses the implications of leadership in a project, which argues that project leaders must possess or develop a number of temporal skills that match the various tasks and situations they are called upon to address. Finally, I posit some roles that project leaders must undertake and the desirable temporal alignment likely to enhance their chances for success. INTRODUCTION In this paper I shall share the rich experience of the project that I was personally involved in. At a local software house, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the first-ever project assigned to that company and as one of the most challenging tasks that the company had ever undertaken. The project was to develop a “Quality Control System” for a pharmaceutical company. I shall describe the different phases of the project and my involvement as a project leader and shall also discuss the significance of the different decisions taken at different points of time. STARTING THE PROJECT All of us are familiar with examples of project managers who fail because they are fundamentally unable to strike an effective balance between the roles they must undertake. For example, the detail people who get so caught up in the day-to-day minutia of project management that they couldn’t articulate a clear vision of the project for their team. The result, many times, is a project spinning out of control because no one involved understands its overall goals. On the other hand, is the case of the "visionary" who gets caught in the trap of adopting a strategic outlook and ignores essential tactical operations--dealing with the myriad daily problems and issues that can slowly sink a project through inefficiencies and delay. It is based on examples such as these that we would note an additional reason for project success or failure: The ability (or inability) of project managers to use the temporal skills that complement the ongoing activities their projects are experiencing. The term "temporal skills" refers to specific project management skills that relate to the past, present, and future. I did not want to repeat any such mistake, as I believe that if the foundation stone of a building is not put properly the building cannot simply be completed. Therefore I first outlined my course of action for the project. The different phases included from the start to the end of the project are: Client Search Requirement gathering Planning (Conception Phase) Budgeting Team building Methodology Timeline Implementation tools Risks/Contingency plans Design Implementation and development Testing (Debugging) Deployment / Delivery Maintenance There must be an "attunement" between project leaders' temporal skills and the nature of the tasks they are engaged in on the job. For example, as we will demonstrate, project team leaders who are "forward looking" or focused on future events will likely develop and implement effective contingency planning as a matter of course. On the other hand, this same future orientation that serves their contingency planning ability so well often makes it difficult for them to deal with real-time issues related to implementing their projects. In the due course of discussion I shall focus on the skills needed for various tasks performed by project leader, their effect on successful team leadership, and offer some guidelines for finding an attunement between time orientation and the demands of the project management job. CLIENT SEARCH: Since this venture was just in its first year, big multinationals were unwilling to take the services of this company. Credibility was the issue. Lots of patience and consistent hard work was required to pass this phase. Convincing any company to handover the important task of developing important software to a new software house is not easy. But if the person has the right set of interpersonal, negotiation and communication skills, he can do it. You should be able to make the client believe that he needs this product and no one else can provide such a cost-effective high quality solution like you. Finally, I was able to convince the management of the local pharmaceutical company and they wanted us to develop a “Quality Control System” which was one of our core competency products. The key point is that an individual's temporal alignment affects choice of tasks and situation as well as the person's ability to develop and use the temporal skills necessary at various levels of project leadership. Different temporal skills are needed for different tasks and activities performed by project leaders. Therefore, it is vital that the temporal alignment or time orientation of a project manager in a given situation fits the requirements of the situation. When this attunement is achieved, project leaders are much more likely to effectively manage themselves as well as the immediate demands they are facing. Temporal alignment may comprise a number of cognitive elements. Thoms and Greenberger (1995) suggest that some of these constructs may be timeline orientation, future time perspective, time span, and time conception. While this list is not all-inclusive, it represents a "best guess" at what dimensions may make up temporal alignment based on previous psychological research. A few skills that I think were mandatory for this phase was Self-belief, patience, good communication and convincing skills, Networking skills, sociability and belief in the team that they would come up to meet the expectations of the client. REQUIREMENT GATHERING The Requirement gathering is one of the most important phases as it lays down the basis for the entire project. If you have not understood the product and customer’s requirements fully, the client may reject your project in the end and the redevelopment costs are very high. In some cases the client even doesn’t fully know what he needs. So you should be able to understand his problem and suggest your own cost effective solution that the customer will value. Here as a project leader I was required to utilize my good skills of communication, inquisitiveness and empathy. The customer required a system at his labs where the chemists select a sample of pills from each newly manufactured batch of pills. The chemist will select the name of the tablet from the menu list and then enter the parameters, on which a pill is tested, in to the “Quality Control System”. The system will compare all the parameters with the standard desired range, stored in the system’s database, and will let the chemist know whether the batch is ok or not. It was a complex software as the company used to manufacture great variety of medicines which had different Quality parameters. I also gave them advices as to how their software should look like and how the user interface should be designed. A SRS (Software Requirement Specification) document was made containing the customer requirements. The key skills that helped me as a leader sail smoothly through this phase were good communication and understanding skills, politeness, honesty to customers, good analytical skills, Persuasive and influential skills. PLANNING Planning is the stage that really tests your business and analytical skills. It includes the financial feasibility of the project (Budgeting), Team building planning, Timeline of the various stages of the project, Decision on the Implementation tool, Risks (Contingency plans) which are important aspects of planning. In this situation you have to conceptualize the final product and its estimated cost and keeping in view the resource constraints as well. As regards project leaders, charged with providing the energy and direction for our project teams, they need to understand how their own temporal alignment will impact their leadership ability. What are they predisposed to do well, and what aspects of their job will be a trial to them due to their time orientation? Corporations, eager to improve their project management practices, should actively seek candidates to run their projects who possess the requisite mix of temporal attunement skills to perform the varied duties their jobs demand. Clearly, the best case scenario would be to find managers who have the ability to vary their time orientation to their current demands. However, while the optimal alternative, it may be more likely that these project leaders will, in fact, perform some activities well due to their temporal orientations while performing some aspects of their jobs less willingly or satisfactorily. Such a conclusion suggests that a more appropriate strategy would be for organizations to recognize these individual limitations and develop skills training in time orientation for project staff and especially managers to help them learn how to create an effective mix of past, present, and future time orientations. In selecting and developing effective project, we need to find ways to assess the skills needed by leaders in specific functions associated with their role. In other words, what specific roles will project managers undertake in these organizations and what are the appropriate temporal orientations associated with those roles? Project managers are inundated with myriad demands and competing requirements for successful performance, requiring shifting competencies among these demands. It is imperative that organizations promote efforts to select and equip their project team leaders with the skill set necessary to meet these competing demands and time orientations. Budgeting In Budgeting, you should know the exact estimate of the cost to be incurred, number of people you would require and the equipment/hardware you would need. The development costs per day, escalation costs in case of rapid development and the costs of implementation tools and various other costs can be highly variable depending on client’s budget. I had to be as accurate as possible and for that you should consult your development team as well and ask them how much time they will take keeping in view their expertise and productivity. Most managers don’t include documentation and quality assurance hours that are significant areas. Here Business Acumen, Analytical skills, Participative management helped me immensely. Team building Selecting the right people for your project is one of the most critical requirements for a successful project. Hiring a competitive team who are committed to the company and are willing to go an extra mile for the project completion is the key. You should be able to assess the skill level of the applicant and hire accordingly. Hiring flexible and cooperative people has always been my preference as they gel easily with different teams and can communicate effectively. While hiring a team I keep in mind the budget constraints and hire accordingly but the compensation/ incentive structure should also be enough to motivate the team members and they should be aligned to the goals/targets and jobs assigned to them. In this phase my assessment skills, Functioning/Technical skills helped me build an effective and productive team. Now what is left is to guide and motivate this team to the successful completion of this project. Methodology There can be many approaches in which we can decide to develop our project. It can be waterfall, incremental, evolutionary, iterative, parallel or Spiral model. I decided to go with parallel model in which my three sub teams would work in parallel and their work will be integrated. The negative of this approach is that it requires extensive coordination between teams and once the requirements are finalized, they can’t be changed. I went for this model because I gathered the requirements from the customers quite well and development time is significantly reduced in this approach. I was aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each aspect at every point. Timeline Before agreeing on a deadline with customer, a project manager should make the timelines for each phase. MS Project can be used for this purpose. Before deciding on the timelines for each stage, I consulted my development/coding head for setting deadlines that were achievable. Let's consider each of these component pieces: Timeline orientation refers to the temporal context or space in time to which an individual is oriented. People tend to visualize themselves to varying degrees in the past, present, or future (Cottle, 1967). Most of us see and think of ourselves most frequently in one of these spaces. Future time perspective describes the extent to which the future drives current behavior. The higher the future time perspective, the farther into the future the individual is thinking and planning. This future time perspective can have a tremendous impact on driving present behavior (Daltrey, 1982; Daltrey & Langer, 1984). Time span is the amount or block of future time one is capable of capturing in one's mind (Jaques, 1986). Some of us have the capacity to deal with time spans of only weeks or months, while others are capable of conceptualizing time spans stretching out into many years. An argument could be made that more effective project leaders are often those who can visualize increments of three to five years in order to maintain a focus on the final project result regardless of its current state of development. Time conception is a set of beliefs about the nature of time and life, typically taking one of two forms, cyclical or linear. A cyclical conception of time is a belief that life is a cycle. Life events repeat themselves in cycles related to seasons, generations, and trends. This belief is commonly found in agricultural societies, but can also be found in modern business environments. Tradition ally, we think of people with this belief as past oriented, but recent research indicates that people with a cyclical conception of time are as likely to be as future oriented as those with a linear conception (Schiller, 1990; Wall & Arden, 1990). A linear conception views life as one continuous line with the future ahead and the past done forever. This conception is typically found in Western industrialized cultures. In addition, time is viewed as a tangible resource that, if wasted, cannot be recovered. To the above constructs suggested by Thoms and Greenberger (1995), we would add polychronic/monochronic preference. Polychronic preference is the predilection to do or consider multiple subjects at the same time (Bluedorn, Kaufman, & Lane, 1992). This preference appears to be culturally based. Most Americans are thought to be monochronic--preferring to do one thing at a time. However, in many cultures, it is expected that the individual will be polychronic, considering many activities and ideas simultaneously. While Thoms and Greenberger did not consider this dimension in their original work, from a project management perspective, polychronicity is a vital skill for project leaders to develop. For me, Projects, by definition, represent a series of complex or interrelated activities requiring that attention be paid to multiple operations in various stages at the same time. Read More