A Successful implementation of the School and Community Arts Center - Essay Example

INTRODUCTION When a project has to be completed successfully, the people who are involved in the operations, the roles of the participants of the project and the ways in which information flows between the individuals has to be clearly understood. When people from various groups are involved in a community project, the person who takes up the responsibility of completion of the project has to be more careful in the planning and organizing. People from various groups, which may be organizations or departments may have the common interest to complete the project. But there are chances that their interests may be conflicting to each other and sometimes may delay the project. Project management scientists describe about various types of organization structures for the smooth project completion. In other words, there are various ways in which the people involved can be related and arranged together. The project management team has to consider the needs of the individuals and the needs of the company. For the smooth operations in carrying out a project the relationships between the people involved and their way of interactions would be planned and organized. Poorly organized team will have dysfunctional communication lines and will cause informal locus centers of power and pave way for destructional politics and will lead to total anarchy. According to Sadler1, the three tasks that are very important for project management are control, integration and the relationships. Hence, in this essay, various people involved and how they will be organized together to complete the School and Community arts center is discussed. THE PEOPLE WHO NEED TO BE INVOLVED AND THEIR ROLES IN THE PROJECT When the community arts centre and the school are planned in the city, first there is the client and the company. The client being the Local authority, a local council and the company is the architect who is the project manager. But upon further reading we can understand that, there are more players in this project. The project requirements are building a school, day care centre and in addition a small community hall and small community arts centre. I building these 4 structures, the city council and the architect have to interact with quite number of parties such depending upon the requirements. to understand the relationships between the various parties, first we have to know the background of the project. The land for the development of the school and community hall are to be ceded to the local authority. The primary school that is to be built is going to replace an existing primary school. When the developers want to develop a sustainable school, the university is very much interested. Hence, in this project of building a sustainable school the university is one more party that is involved. The child day care centre is to be run by the private nursery “play box”. Hence, in the development of the child day care centre, this is another party involved. The other parties that are involved in the project are the various departments such as the planning, environmental, highways and financial departments. These departments are overlapping in their span of control when it comes to the involvement in this project. Altogether, if we want to show the involvement of the various parties, we can show it with the diagram as follows: The roles that will be played in this project have to be clearly defined in order to avoid time delays and conflicts. The number of people involved here and their interdependencies show clearly that for this project the people involved here have to be decked like a matrix. As mentioned by Galbraith2 , the traditional definition of roles cannot be applied here because the project is controlled by people who are in multi various overlapping roles. The roles of these groups can be clearly defined through the integration of the flow of work. The critical point to be remembered is the interface between the functioning units. Innovative methods of coordinating work between the functional units have to be done without changing the organization structure. In this project, the organizational structure cannot be changes as there most of the parties involved are external to the organization and control can be exerted over them only to the minimum level. But coordination can be achieved through several integrating mechanisms such as establishing rules and procedures, developing a proper planning process, devising hierarchical referrals and having direct contact for exchanging information. In this project, the roles played by the city council and the architect would be reciprocal in nature. It is not a regular customer – company relationship, but it is a kind of partnership relationship. The city council is partnering with the architect to achieve certain objectives. The relationship between the other departments is of consultative in nature. For having the relationship smooth and to avoid gaps in communication, a team can be formed, with representatives from the various city council departments and the managers in charge for the various projects. Hence, there will be one representative from the city council responsible for coordinating this project and there will be one representative from each of the coordinating departments such as the planning, environmental, highways and financial departments. The team member from the city council side also will include, the education consultant and another representative from the buildings procurement department. From the architect’s side, the team members will comprise of the managers who are responsible for the individual buildings such as the school, day care centre, community hall and the community arts centre. Also the architect can have jobs allotted to people based on the activity and not on the job like suggested before. all the planning activities with respect to the four objectives and likewise the other managerial activities can be allotted to one person. Then the team will comprise of the strategic planning manager, human resource manager who looks after the organizing and staffing and financial manager. Also in the next level the team should also have members from the university and the people who are going to run the community arts center and the day care center. Hence, the team will be totally like a matrix. The team can meet regularly and the members who are concerned with the particular activity will be part of the meeting and if special members have to attend, information should be sent in advance. The team which meets to decide on key issues will be headed by the member from the city council for the whole project and the other members are to be consulted before making decisions. The suggestions and ideas from the other concerned members are invited and discussed. Feasibility of the ideas are evaluated by the managers and work is to be carried out. The members from the city council will be playing more of the consultative and controlling roles and the members from the architects will play the roles of planners, organizers and checking whether the activities are carried out in the desired way to satisfy the customer and by providing periodical reports to the city council about the progress of the project. But when such kind of matrix structure is developed, the ground rules that have to be remembered are mentioned by Kerzner3 as follows: 1. Participants should spend full time on the project, this ensures a degree of loyalty 2. Horizontal as well as vertical channels must exist for making commitments 3. There must be quick and effective ways of conflict resolution 4. There must be good communication channels and free access between managers 5. All managers must have an input into the planning process 6. Both horizontally and vertically oriented managers must be willing o negotiate for resources The points mentioned above are very crucial for smooth functioning when matrix format is adopted. Matrix structure is very suitable for these kind of projects because the traditional arrangement of people in line structure or line and staff structure cannot be flexible enough to accommodate roles played by various people. A matrix form is best suited but it should not be confusing, unambiguous and make people less accountable. The objective of the matrix structure is to have a synergy through shared responsibility between project and functional management. For this there should be mutual understanding between the managers from the architect and the representatives from the city council since both the individuals share the authority, responsibility and accountability on each project, and hence they should continuously communicate and exchange information and negotiate. The team members should remember that there should not be any disruption due to dual responsibility and a difference in judgment should not delay the work in progress. The roles played by the city council and the architect can be shown with the following diagram: *Adopted from Kerzner Harold, Project management It can be understood that project management as a whole is a coordinative function but the matrix management is a collaborative functional division of project management. Here, in this kind of organization Structured information exchange becomes mandatory and several people may be required for the same piece of work. The advantages of this type of role definition is that, the project manager has maximum control over the resources. the policies and procedures are set up individually for the projects separately and the policies of one project does not contradict with another. With this kind of set up where the roles are clearly defined, then the conflicts that arise and any change in the environment can be reacted upon quickly. Another major advantage is that in this kind of role definition is that key personnel can be shared and thereby cost can be controlled and hence there is a better balance between time, const and control. Authority and responsibility are shared and the stress is distributed across the team members. But the drawbacks with this kind of set up can be the multidimensional work flow and information slow. There can also be change in priorities of the team members. Killian4 mentions in his work that, the managers can sometimes be ambiguous about the roles played and there can be continuous conflicts. Conflict resolution can be a very challenging task. There can be a verity of conflicts such as the conflict over project priorities, administrative procedures, technical opinions and performance trade offs, manpower resources, cost and schedules. Whatever may the source of conflict, the way to avoid conflict and to solve conflict is though communication. Information should be exchanged between the members of the team both horizontally and vertically. Policies and procedures should be developed to ensure that information of the right kind reaches the right person at the right time. Harmonious work relationships have to be maintained within the members of the project team and the support team for the smooth completion of the project. EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION WITHIN THE MATRIX It is explained by Gray and Hughes5 the way in which the flow of information influences the success of the project. When a matrix structure is formed, there can be major pitfalls and traps that affects the free flow of information and it should be remembered that proper communication is also a form of motivation. Hence, the communicator, would thoroughly plan about what he wants to communicate and the way in which he wishes to communicate. He should appeal to the interests of the customer. After the communication is made, feedback is to be obtained and evaluation should be made about the effectiveness of the communication made. In this case of building school and other structures, the team manager should approve program plans and work description, work authorization and the schedule for defining specific program requirements. For example in the construction of the school, the team manager should define the work specifications and the role of the staff involved in carrying out the activities. To avoid conflicts and to encourage communication, first the scheduling of activities and the definition of the jobs has to be done. The team leader will sign the correspondence relating to the program directions and he corresponds with the customer, the city council pertaining to the operations of the project managers. The team leader should also communicate with the customer and to the management of the architecture firm about the achievement of milestones in the project and he does periodical appraisal about the progress of the project. When the team leader is not available the person who is given authority in his absence carries out these jobs to inform the concerned parties. The project managers should be responsible for the overall project direction, control and coordination and he is the principal contact with the architect company for the city council. Hence, he takes the help from the representatives of the various government departments in deciding the best for the completion of the project. But when coordinating the activities there can be delays in reporting the progress to the customer. This may cause dissatisfaction, even tough the work is completed. Hence, periodical review meetings should be held to communicate with the customer to avoid mistrusts. Review meetings are essential in project meetings. But the meetings should not be flooded with ideas and irrelevant information. When the meetings are conducted often to plan every detail, the agenda keeps extending which causes delay in actual work. Also discussion of irrelevant agenda items reduces the importance of the meetings. Another major pitfall that can occur in carrying out project is that the customer may not be satisfied with the kind of technical information provided. The technical information provided can be sometimes too high which may be incomprehensible and confusing to the customer and sometimes the technical information is not adequate that evaluation of the work by the customer is not possible. Hence, the right amount of information is to be provided keeping in mind the nature of the customer and the purpose of communication. Apart from regular review meetings other opportunities for exchange of information has to be created. Policies and procedures have to be developed so that uniform practice is adopted throughout the project team until completion by all the members. The project team members, should accept that regular departmental meetings should be conducted. This departmental meetings are essential to appraise the staff in each department about the activities to be done. If any decision made in this meeting affect or includes the work of any other department then proper communication in the form of written communication has to be sent as and when the decisions are made to the head of the next department. The concerned department heads should accept the communication and should take the necessary actions which have to be notified to this department. Likewise if there are any changes in the plans regarding the usage of resources or time involved in a particular department communication should be sent to the project manager immediately. The project managers will analyze the reason and recommend appropriate corrective actions. Also all the information about the project will be sent to the customer only through the project manager and not anybody else. This avoid s better control and avoids confusion about the quality of information provided. When is comes to the media of communication, emails are to be used expensively and office memos are to be used. In addition to this the agenda and minutes of all department meetings are to be submitted to the project manager and the agenda and minutes of all the project review meetings are to be submitted to the customer. The department meetings are to be informed in advance to all the members of the department through circulars. If any problem is encountered in the execution of the project the department heads should communicate to the project manager immediately. The project manager will try to solve the problem and if not possible meeting will be conducted with the team leader to identify solutions. If not possible meeting is conducted with the customer and alternate plans are to be developed. CONCLUSION Definitions of the roles to create an interface between the various activities and developing communication lines across the team is not an easy task. It needs a lot of planning in advance, managerial skill and also strong interpersonal skill by the team leader. The role of the team leader is very crucial because he is involved directly in designing the project and also in terms of addressing to the people in case of problem situations. When the project this successful, the team members are to be appreciated for their work, but when there are project hick ups, then the relationships of the team members have to be defined carefully and the polices have to be appraised for their effectiveness. REFERENCES 1. Sadler, P (1971) “Designing an Organizational Structure” Management International Review, Vol 11, No. 6, pp 19 – 33 2. Galbraith, J. R (1971) “Matrix Organization Designs” Business Horizons, February, pp : 29 – 40 3. Kerzner, H (1992) Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling and controlling, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York 4. Killian, W. P (1980) “Project Management – Future Organizational Concept” Marquette Business Review, pp: 90 – 107 5. Gray, C. and Hughes, W (2001) Building Design Management, Heinemann, Butterworth Read More