Key Factors for Successful Projects - Literature review Example

Key Factors for Successful Projects Introduction The key factors for making projects successful are varied and often depend on the nature of the project as well as the scope and objectives (Meredith & Mantel, 1995). However, there are a few pieces of the puzzle which seem to be mentioned quite frequently in the concerned literature and it seems that things such as leadership, getting the right people, and establishing a good plan become the foundations of all successful projects. To better understand these key factors, it would be useful to analyze them individually as they relate to the success had by a company. Leadership Leadership has many definitions and it seems that there is no real consensus on exactly what comprises leadership. Despite this lack of a definition on which everyone can agree upon, the general opinions given by business professionals and analysts such as Welch (2005), Byrne (1998) and Gardner (1995) have several common points with the definition given by House (2004) who states that leadership is, “The ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members (House, 2004, Pg. 15)”. The importance of leadership is directly related to successful projects because it connects with the idea of creating trust in the guidance of the project leader. This creation of trust and making the employees believe in the leadership of the leader is a trait of the leader since it requires the leader to possess the ability to motivate employees in a transparent manner without using coercion to show that the viewpoint of the leader is the correct one (House, 2004). According to Welch (2005), the idea of transparency in leadership means being completely honest with the employees about everything; going from their quarterly evaluations to the company’s annual financial reports, the leader has to create trust. It also requires the leader to be good with oral and written communications, be diplomatic and tactful as well as present his/her case to a group of peers or close subordinates when they do not agree with the decision or are hesitant at making tough calls (Gardner, 1995). The Success of Projects Gardner (1995) and DePree (1989) suggest that for projects to be successful, leaders should set an example for the employees that they can emulate. This example depends on a complex yet close connection between the leader and the employees where the employees try to create the same qualities and abilities within themselves as the leader shows a possession of. Given the situation that the leader can take risks, accept that s/he made a mistake if the risk turns out to be a mistake, and shows that a lesson has been learned, it means that s/he is setting a good example for the team. In many scenarios, such leadership skills show that the leading individual has vision as well as character. Throughout history, many political as well as social leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. had this power to share their personal vision with many different people and make them come to see things from their point of view (Gardner, 1995). In business projects, such leaders become responsible for the finances of the project as well as the vision, mission and ethics that are followed in the project (DePree, 1989). Jack Welch used the same rules and tenants of leadership for creating successful projects at GE. In fact, when he had meetings with many of the middle management personnel as well as senior managers of the company, the meetings were always held in an informal setting. Such settings and enlightened leadership allowed everyone to share their vision of the project and get feedback from the group about the current running and present conditions of their projects (Byrne, 1998). Thus it becomes clear that leadership is an essential part of successful handling of projects that a company may have. However, leaders do not work alone on projects and often having a good team is as important as having a good leader. Recruiting and Selecting the Right People Recruitment for any position for a given project will depend on several factors which influence how people can and should be brought in to work on the project. For example, the army does not advertise for the position of a general while a bank may require hiring a person to function as their CEO or president or even a project manager to handle the setup of an IT department. The first step for recruitment therefore depends on the nature of the project and the job in question. An example from catering services is provided by Osborne (2005) who says that employee referrals can work wonders for short staffed projects. When it comes to larger projects, employee referrals are just one way in which a company can carryout a recruitment drive. The culture of the industry and the values held by the organisation can point towards several different directions which can be taken by company for effective recruitment. Nottingham’s City Council is an example of a government organisation which needed personnel for a variety of projects and wanted accountants, town planners, housing developers, and social support workers. Their recruitment drive for development related projects was wide ranging and it used many different advertising methods to let the public know that they were offering jobs in the city (Suff, 2005). To seek good applicants, the City Council worked with employment brokers, recruitment specialists, public job centres as well as various universities to get data about people who were good matches for their requirements. They established a separate project within the city government called ‘Nottingham Works’ which had the sole purpose of hiring, testing and evaluating the skills of prospective workers (Suff, 2005). This was all done to make sure that the city was able to find the best people who were most suited for working on the particular projects which the city was interested in. Targeted Recruiting It is relatively clear that the employee recruitment process for any project in any industry needs the HR manager to look for desirable traits to be presented in interviews. For example, the communication skills and even the general demeanour of the candidate can have a great impact on what they bring to a given project. Candidates with high energy, assertiveness, social graces, good judgement, high confidence, good communication skills and superior intelligence are certainly placed at an advantage in such situation (Cornelius, 2000). After that, the project manager also has to look at job specific criteria like education, specialised training, work experience and individual motivation. A person’s hobbies and interests are also a very important factor i.e. if the person is service oriented they would probably make a better customer support officer than a technician or analyst for a given project (Campbell, 2005). In the real world, the personal orientation of an individual can lead them to make career choices based on their interests. For example, a person who is good with finances and can handle balance sheets with ease can be said to be finance oriented and would probably do well in finance related projects. It is up to the individual managers and selectors to see what the person is geared for doing and then finding the best match between the personality and the project. Profiling a candidate can be used to create this match in the reverse direction. For example, a company may create a list of desirable skills and attitudes which they think are best suited for a position in a project and then select the candidate which gives a closest match to those skills and attitudes from a given pool of new candidates or present employees of the company. In effect, the company creates a profile for the ideal candidate and then searches for the one man or woman which matches the description (Barker, 2005). Profiling This process of project team member selection via profiling can be taken a step further by the company if they create the profile of the ideal candidate by looking at their present and past top performing employees. Barker (2005) suggests that the candidates who have similar experiences and skills to the current stars of the company can be expected to shine when they are put in the same situation as the present project team members (Barker, 2005). In addition to this being a good practice, it also creates a suitable measure and an accepted standard by which all other incoming applicants can be evaluated. While the process of getting applicants to send in their resumes for a particular project or making them an offer of employment may be relatively easy, the difficult part comes when a company realises that the incoming project team members may not be of the right quality, or may need further training or may even be in a hurry to leave the project. This is where the issue of retaining employees and development of human capital through training and education is raised (Trumble & Overstreet, 2006). Of course, it is unreasonable to expect that an incoming project team member would be able to jump in the middle of things and start performing from the get go. In fact, it is more likely that a person would require some training and education which helps them come to terms with the rules of the team and the general culture as well as scope of the given project. Project Mentors For this purpose, it is possible to assign a project mentor/coach to the individuals coming in who can provide them with the required support from the first day (Cornelius, 2000). Even if the job is for the short term, a mentor can be assigned to a group from which feedback can be taken to see if any employees from the group show the promise of continued employment and deployment on other projects. The mentor can also spot areas which are troublesome for the recruited project team members and suggests means by which the problem can be avoided in the future. Mentoring was one of the tools successfully used by Ernest & Young who hired programmers for the short term to work on their Y2K readiness project and selected the top performers from that group for permanent placement within the company. They were able to benefit from the addition resources to the company since it meant that top quality programmers could be retained without expensive recruitment drives (Barker, 2005). This is just one of the many examples of how employee development from the human resource management team can result in successful completion of projects as well as other benefits for the company. However, without planning such moves, a company or a project would be quite lost in a jungle of misdirection. Planning While it is placed last, planning is not the least of the issues which lead to a project being a success or a failure (Gardiner, 2005). In fact, it can be ranked just as important as leadership in terms of how it impacts a given project. Out of the four essential management functions, planning is considered by Daft (2000) and Welch (2005) to be the most important element for the success of a project while at the same time, individuals like Graham et. al. (2005) see it to be the most contentious function in a project due to the uncertainty of the future. It must be understood that planning is done to achieve certain project related goals. These goals can specify where the project should be at some point in the future. Goals are stated as the intention or targets of the project that are specific, measurable, cover key result areas, challenging, and should have defined time periods. For individuals and workers on a project, the goals may be linked to rewards (Welch, 2005). At the same time, planning specifies the means for achieving the projects goals (Daft, 2000). Project goals and the plans which are based on solid goals are associated with specific time horizons of short term, intermediate term or long term duration. For each time period, different goals for the project team may be defined as operational goals, tactical goals and strategic goals. The further the time line is stretched, the broader is the definition of the goals. In such situations, long-term goal helps the project management team set long-term direction for the project. In order to achieve the long term objective, long term plans needs to be established. Although this may seem like a simplistic exercise, it does require strategic planning and management as well as the development of all assets which a project may need to call on for support. Goals and plans help to facilitate an employee’s identification with the project and help motivate them by reducing uncertainty while clarifying what they should accomplish over various stretches of time. As described earlier, the goal provides the ‘why’ of the project’s existence, where as the ‘plan’ explains to all employees how the team plans to gets to the given goals. Long term planning defines what actions will be taken by the company to achieve the goals which it has set out for with the project it is working on (Daft, 2000). As time passes, businesses as well as the projects established by them are becoming mature, but at the same time the business environment is becoming more sensitive to even small changes. Japanese companies are probably the best example to show that planning on projects for the long term results in successful pays off. Japanese car makers have always followed the long term strategy of high quality, reliable vehicles and are now the dominant force in the market while American or European vehicles tend to be more fashionable or trendy but not as dependable (Irani, 2006). The market share and profitability of Japanese car makers speaks of their successful project plans while the Europeans and Americans struggle to emulate them. Conclusion There may be hundreds of other factors which lead a project to being a shining success or a ignoble failure but the four topics discussed above certainly point towards the importance of having them as an essential focus for any project. While these pieces of the puzzle are relatively clear, it seems that there is a lot more to learn about project management and handling successful projects simply because the field of business management is so vast. However, armed with good leadership, a team filled with the right people which follows a preset and well thought out plan, it is unlikely that too many projects could fail. In fact, I feel that the chances of success in such cases would be far greater. Works Cited Barker, J. 2005. ‘How to Pick the Best People (And Keep Them)’, Potentials, vol. 38, no. 11, pp 33-36. Byrne, J. 1998. ‘How Jack Welch Runs GE: A Close-up Look at How Americas #1 Manager Runs GE’, BusinessWeek.com, [Online] Available at: http://www.businessweek.com/1998/23/b3581001.htm Campbell, M. 2005, ‘Skills? What skills?’, Credit Management, vol. 11, no. 1, pp16-17. Cornelius, N. 2000, Human Resource Management: A Managerial Perspective, Thomson Business Press. Daft, R. 2000, Management, Dryden Press. DePree, M. 1989, Leadership Is an Art. New York: Doubleday. Gardiner, P. 2005, Project Management - A strategic planning approach, Palgrave. Gardner, H. 1995, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. Basic. Graham, J., Harvey, C. and Rajgopal, S. 2005 ‘The Economic Implications of Corporate Financial Reporting’, Journal of Accounting and Economics, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 3–73. House, R. 2004, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations. SAGE Publications. Irani, J. 2006, `The Focus on short-term results in business is a disaster’, Initiatives of Change International, [Online] Available at: http://www.iofc.org/en/abt/newsroom/888.html Meredith, J. & Mantel, S. 1995, Project Management: A Managerial Approach-3rd Edition, Wiley. Trumble, R. and Overstreet, S. 2006. ‘Effectively motivating and retaining employees: Options other than money’, Journal of Compensation & Benefits, vol. 22, no. 1, pp 12-19. Welch, J. 2005, Winning. HarperCollins. Word Count: 2,662 Read More