Human Resource Planning
| The first of the process groups in project human resource management is human resource planning. According to PMBOK, this determines "roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships, and creates the staff management plan." The roles and responsibilities can be for either a group of people or an individual. The groups may be internal, or they may be a contracted project management firm. In the case of the latter, it is absolutely necessary that the roles of the people as well as their responsibilities be documented before beginning the project. With internal groups, the overall organizational policies and structures apply. So too do the roles and responsibilities and the reporting relationships that the team members have within the organization. The structure of reporting lines is extremely important for the project manager to consider because this will determine how the project manager handles the team. For the most part, an internal project manager does not have complete control over the project team. The various team members with their variety of skill sets usually report to managers in the functional area they represent. As we discuss types of power later in this chapter, you will see how important this issue is for the project manager to consider and manage. Often the external or contracted project manager, if he or she is running his or her own contracted project team, will have control over the entire function of the team. This is one of the major differences in a project manager's span of control. Communications planning and organizational planning interact as planning processes. The project's final structure will determine the communication requirements of the project, and the communication planning will follow the organizational planning.
The answer is A. The various members of the project team that is built within an organization will have reporting lines to their functional managers and will not report directly to the project manager. The inputs to organizational planning are enterprise environmental factors, organizational process assets, and the project management plan that includes the activity resource requirements (PMBOK). Organizational culture and structure are the major topics within the input of enterprise environmental factors. Some of the factors involving organizational culture and structure are organizational, technical, interpersonal, logistical, and political. The organizational factor includes information about the departments that will be involved in the project, the current working relationships between the various departments, and the relationships, formal and informal, that exist between the departments that will be used to execute the project.
The answer is C. A reporting relationship is a formal relationship that is designed by the organization. There will be many relationships and reporting lines within an organization, and as a project manager, you will be expected to know these in order to better manage the project. The issue of current working relationships is also a major one for a project manager. If there is a history of either good or bad relationships between departments, you should be aware of it. Although past relationships between departments do not always indicate future behavior with respect to your project, they can be used as guidelines and can give you a "heads up" on potential issues. The second type of relationship deals with the formality of the relationship. The formal relationships will be shown in organizational charts and are easy to ascertain. The informal relationships are ones that will determine the overall dynamics of the project team and as such are something that the project manager must monitor constantly. The technical interfaces will be between various technical disciplines or functions. The interpersonal interfaces will be between various individuals working on the project and may be formal, as in the case of a reporting line to a manager, or informal, as in the relationship between two people who are on the project team and need to communicate to complete their tasks. In addition, you need to know the job descriptions of the various team members, which will help determine choices of personnel. Finally, the trust levels between the various project team members are very important dynamics for the project manager to manage. At least it would be good to know whether there are any questions about trust between potential team members so that issues may be brought forward and handled early in the project. The logistical part of the enterprise environmental factors consists of the working spaces and the distances between people on the team. If your team is multinational, and several members of the team are working in other countries, you must work to make sure that you can accommodate issues such as time changes, lack of interpersonal communication, and various local customs that will impact the work of the project team. Collocation is usually recommended for making the best project team. Collocation means having the entire project team in the same building, either with adjoining facilities or housed in one large room. (This almost never happens during the complete duration of the project.)
The answer is D. The logistics can get very complicated if you are using a multinational team with members in various far-flung places. Finally, the political aspects of the organizational culture will have an impact on how the project team works. Not political in terms of national parties, but rather in terms of smaller groups. The only time national parties may enter into project management might be when the politics of a certain country factor into the completion of the project. Permits and licenses may be a part of this issue. Project team politics may include informal power that some department has within a given organization. For instance, in many IT organizations, the development department has the greatest organizational power because that department is the one that actually creates the product or service.
The answer is B. All of these are constraints that may affect the project and the project manager. The key for the project manager is to check at the beginning of the project to determine whether any of these constraints will affect the project as it is executed. The second input into human resources planning is organizational process assets, which are sets of processes in an organization that are useful for performing the project. Two of the major process assets listed in PMBOK are templates and checklists. These two give guidelines to the project manager and, if in fact they already exist, will make it easier to reduce the amount of planning time because processes are already in place for certain tasks in the organization. Even though the current project will not exactly mirror a past project, the templates and checklists used before may be extremely helpful. Be sure to monitor these two assets to make sure that your current project's checklist content is taken care of, and do not assume that the past checklists or templates are carbon copies of what you need currently.
The answer is C. These two are process assets that can be used to help reduce the amount of time needed in the planning process if used correctly. The project plan is the last of the inputs to human resource planning. The project plan has a variety of information useful to the new project manager. First, the activity resource requirements have been detailed so that planning flows from available information. Second, there are a variety of project management activities such as risk management and procurement that are listed in the overall project plan that can help the project manager assess and assign people to various tasks that are needed in the project.
The answer is B. Human resource planning is the area where required people are identified. Three tools and techniques for human resource planning are found in the 3rd edition of the PMBOK. They are organization charts and position descriptions, networking, and organizational theory. There are a variety of formats used to document the team members' roles, responsibilities, and relationships. According to the PMBOK, most of the formats fall into three types: hierarchical, matrix, and text-oriented. The Work Breakdown Structure is an example of a hierarchical chart. It shows relationships of the various tasks and people in a top-down, graphic format. The WBS looks like a family tree and is common in organizational control. In addition to the WBS, PMBOK lists two other types of breakdown structures. The first is the Organization Breakdown Structure, or OBS. The difference between the WBS and the OBS is that the OBS shows departments or units of the organization and is not organized along the lines of deliverables. The next breakdown structure type is the Resource Breakdown Structure, or RBS. This type of hierarchical chart breaks down the project by resource types so that the project manager can see quickly which resources can be grouped together. For instance, quality testers may be listed together, although they may be used at different times during the project for different areas of quality testing. The RBS does not have to be only for human resources and may include materials, communication technologies, and other types of resources needed to execute the project.
The answer is D. All of them have a graphic, top-down, "family tree" orientation.
The answer is B. The Organizational Breakdown Structure shows the organization's units and departments as a top-down graph.
The answer is A. The Resource Breakdown Structure details the various resources, both human and mechanical, that are needed to successfully execute the project.
The answer is D. The Work Breakdown Structure is one of the principal documents that a project manager uses to manage the project. The second format type that is mentioned in the PMBOK is the matrix format. Table 13-1 is an example of a matrix format that shows usage of personnel on three tasks that need to be done in an IT project. The Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) details the different tasks for the people listed in the matrix chart. You can see quickly which people have overlapping tasks and which are used on specific tasks. This will help you as you schedule the project.
The answer is B. The Responsibility Assignment Matrix is used to give an overview of personnel responsibility for particular tasks. The text-oriented format is generally a written file that describes the roles and responsibilities of a person on the project. This type of format allows for greater detail than others, but it is not used for quick analysis of personnel needs. The outputs to the human resource planning are roles and responsibilities, project organization charts, and the staffing management plan. PMBOK suggests that four items should be considered when listing the roles and responsibilities of a person on the project. In addition to roles and responsibilities themselves, the other items are authority and competency. Authority is defined as "the right to apply project resources, make decisions, and sign approvals." Authority is generally assigned in the organizational structure, although there may be projects where there will be matrixed authority. It is best when the responsibilities of the individual are matched with the authority to get tasks done. It is extremely frustrating to be given the responsibility for a task without the necessary authority to see it through. The competency item in roles and responsibilities deals with the skills of the project member to complete project tasks and responsibilities. People are occasionally assigned to a project who do not have the requisite skills to get particular tasks done or who are not sufficiently trained to do the tasks in a timely manner. Knowing the skill levels of project team members is important when planning human resources for any type of project.
The answer is B. This authority will most often come from the organization.
The answer is D. The project manager must know the skill sets and skill levels of potential project team members to do effective human resource planning. The project organization chart is a graphic display of the various members of the project team and the managers to whom they report. This chart can help the project manager to gain an understanding of the communication lines needed to run the project. The staffing management plan is a subset of the project management plan. This plan details the resources needed for the project. Depending on the size and complexity of the project, this plan will be formal or informal, detailed or broadly stated. The more complex the project, the more detail is included. In a large DoD project, this type of plan will almost always be formal. On a project with a smaller scope, the plan may be informal. The detail and formality of the staffing management plan depends on the needs of the project. A variety of information can be captured in the staffing management plan. Some items are optional. These include staff acquisition, a timetable, release criteria, training needs, recognition and rewards, compliance, and safety. Each of these items can be detailed or even left out if the project warrants it.
The answer is B. The size and complexity of the project will be one of the determining factors as to whether to make the staffing management plan formal or informal. Staff acquisition includes several questions that must be answered in order to have good human resource planning. Among these questions are whether to keep your HR search in-house or go to outsourcing for resources. Team logistics is another topic that may be included in the staff acquisition plan, although this topic might be found in other places in planning. The logistics issues include the various locations of team members and the ways the team may work from off-site offices. Costs are another issue in staff acquisition. After you have determined the level of skills needed to complete the project, you will have to compute the costs associated with the necessary skills. This type of management decision is often a tradeoff between time and cost, although in the best of all possible projects, you will not have to worry about skimping at all. The timetable for the project can be part of the staffing management plan. You can depict the necessary resource usage using a variety of illustrations. If you look in the PMBOK 3rd ed. at Figure 9-6, you will see a resource histogram that is useful in determining how much time is expected from the various team members and/or functions. Many types of charts are available to show the information. You choose the one with which you are the most comfortable and that gives you manageable information. The release criteria include both the timing of the release of team members and the method in which you will release them. The cost involved with retaining people who are not needed to continue the project can be a major one. This and the fact that orderly transitions to new projects are desirable make the use of release criteria important. Yet another item to be considered in the staffing management plan is the need for training. In some projects, training is needed because the people assigned to the project do not have complete information on the tasks that are required of them. A training plan can be a great help in shoring up the skill levels needed on the project.
The answer is C. These criteria should be determined early in the project. Although not listed by PMBOK at this point, training for end users is important to consider early in the project. If you are installing a new AR system and want end users to understand and use the new software quickly and effectively, it is a good idea to detail the planning that will make this happen. End-user training can make or break the final outcome of the project, so it should be a part of the overall staffing plan because you will need to assign a person or people to actually conduct the training. Recognition and rewards are major parts of the motivation of a project team. In order to make sure that everyone is on the same page, there must be clear criteria for team member rewards and a system to obtain these rewards. In order to be effective, the rewards should be linked directly to something under the project member's control. Frustration can occur if the team member has no control over his or her own rewards. The key to all of this is to make the reasons for rewards clear and to get agreement from various team members concerning what they will be rewarded for during the execution of their particular set of required project tasks. The compliance part of the staffing management plan deals with tactics for complying with contracts, government regulations, and any other applicable policies that the organization has put in place. Usually, these policies will be available through the human resources department, and it is a good idea to check for any compliance issues before beginning the project.
The answer is B. Rewards and recognition are among the most important factors in project team motivation. Another area of compliance is that of legal requirements. Legal requirements may constrain how you choose projects and how projects are executed. An example of this would be a project to shut down support for a previous version of software and to migrate all users to a new version. You should check first with the legal department to make sure that no contracts have been written that would stop you from discontinuing help desk service. This is not an unusual issue, and you should examine it at the beginning of the project. Finally, safety can be a major issue within a staffing management plan. The organization should set policies and procedures concerning the safety of all people involved in the project, which can be included in the staffing management plan. Many construction companies consider safety to be the major issue on a project. It is a good idea to make sure that the policies are in place and then to carry them out.
The answer is C. All of these can be found in a staffing management plan, although this will depend on where the organization prefers to cover these topics.
The answer is D. Compliance with both external and internal regulatory issues is necessary for a project to run smoothly.
The answer is C. Keeping the project team safe, particularly in construction projects, should be a major concern for organizations.
The answer is D. If this is planned at the beginning of the project, it will make running the project much simpler and will prevent potential issues with personnel. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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