Chapter Thirteen. Project Human Resources Management

The human resources management questions on the examination generally are the simplest and easiest. You can answer most of the questions based on your work experience. Although this knowledge area is not stressed on the examination, it is an important one to know because you will be using the principles all the time when working in project management.

According to the PMBOK, this knowledge area includes the "processes that organize and manage the project team." As such, human resources management deals with all the project team, the sponsors/customer, and anyone who is working in support of the project and the project team. If you are in a large organization, you will have an expanded set of people with whom you work, although they will not be directly related to work you do on specific projects.

Chapter 2 of the PMBOK includes some discussion of a variety of topics that are found in general management literature. The literature on this topic is extensive, and courses are offered on this topic up through the PhD level at many colleges. So the Human Resources chapter in the PMBOK is not intended as an in-depth look at managerial skills. The topics in this chapter give you a start in this area, one on which you can and should build.

Several topics are listed: leading, communicating, negotiating, problem solving, and influencing organizational behavior. Each of these topics has significant research behind it, and these topics and skills are useful to any manager. However, these topics are not solely used in a single type of management such as general management. The professional project manager must interact with his or her project team using all of these skills, so the more the project manager knows about them, the higher the chance for project success.

A second set of skills deals with the manager and individuals. These are delegating, motivating, coaching, and mentoring, which tend to be more individually focused than the previously described skills. However, both the first set of skills and the ones listed in this paragraph can be used for more than one person as well as when dealing only with the individual.

Q.	Leading, communicating, and problem solving are examples of ________ management skills.
		A.	Project
		B.	General
		C.	Senior
		D.	HR

The answer is B. These are general skills that managers of any type will need to use in order to perform successfully for the organization.

Q.	According to the PMBOK, delegating, motivating, coaching, and mentoring are skills used to manage the ________.
		A.	Organization
		B.	Project team
		C.	Individual
		D.	Personal relations

The answer is C. These are discussed in the PMBOK as skills that deal with the individual for the most part. However, these skills also can be used in situations with more than one person.

Another set of skills deals with team building and dealing with conflict, which are used in both group and individual management. Finally, there are skills such as performance appraisal, recruitment, retention, regulatory issues, and labor relations that are generally considered more administrative than management-oriented. This is in contrast with the other topics listed earlier, which are found in the behavioral management context.

Q.	Recruitment, regulatory issues, performance appraisal, and labor relations are skills generally used more in the ________ area.
		A.	Tactical
		B.	General management
		C.	Accounting
		D.	Administrative

The answer is D. These are generally thought of as administrative skills and often are not done by the project manager if the organization has experts in these skills within the personnel of the company.

However, a project manager has to understand that although all of these skills are used to manage people on projects, there are also other considerations that pertain only to projects and project management. These considerations are a direct result of the definition of a project.

The first consideration is that by nature, all projects are temporary and are used to create a new product or service. Thus, the relationships in a project are very different from the ongoing relationships that one finds in standard organizational life. The project team is unique to the project you are managing, and although you may use the same project team members on several projects in a row, the projects themselves will be slightly different. This means that you should work to make the general management skill sets fit into the project management arena because these skills relate to any type of organizational setting.

The second consideration is that the project team may expand and contract as the project is executed. The number of people on the project may change as different phases are carried out. So techniques that are useful in one phase may not be useful in the next.

Q.	The ________ of the team may contract and expand depending on the phase of the project.
		A.	Abilities
		B.	Capabilities
		C.	Size
		D.	Concept

The answer is C. The size of the team may change as people are added or let go to meet the requirements of certain phases of the project.

Finally, although we will talk about administrative issues, they are often not the province of the project manager or his or her team. The HR department in most organizations will handle many of the administrative issues, and the HR department should be made up of people who have skill sets that can be used by the project manager, but are skill sets that are not the primary responsibility of the project manager.