Alert, Aware, Involved

To manage the assignment of people to project roles, RNC's Dromgold has developed her own methodology, "Magia", which provides for visibility of people across and between projects to give management clarity about exactly where effort is being applied. Magia also ensures each person is aware of who they are dependent on and who is depending on them, and which people are over-committed (not just on time allocation but on tasks that require conflicting skills).

Clasquin meanwhile uses a roles-based approach, breaking the entire life cycle down into roles, each clearly spelled out, then assigning people to take on those roles. "One person can take on three roles, but they're now crystal clear what they're supposed to do and what they're not supposed to do, but also crystal clear what everybody else is doing. That means all these awkward transitions go away, all these mishandles disappear," he says.

However, project management is also full of "artificial dependencies", Clasquin argues. That is, people waiting for someone else to act before moving on their part of the project. Eliminating these dependencies means instilling a culture that expects people to consider other actions they can take to further the project while they wait. "There are always, if you think about it for half a minute, other things you can do to progress."

Clasquin says he has successfully instilled such a culture by modelling: getting project managers to constantly question and cajole, continually prompting people to consider other work they could do while they wait, and reinforcing the message at every opportunity that the "hold-up" does not translate to "tools-down".

People management is so important to HigherGround managing director Marcus Batten that unless any project he reviews is organized in clear responsibilities he will recommend it be shut down.

Batten learned his approach to managing projects running a diving operation involving hundreds of divers and 30 or 40 ships in the military in the early 1980s. It turned out the best way to assign tasks to people was to use butcher's paper and a chalkboard, and to type clear instructions for every team member. He says an acronym, RAISV, best spells out the vital principles: Responsible, Accountable, Influencer, Service provider and power of Veto.

"With RAISV you only have one person responsible, two accountable. You can have any number of influencers, and the same for service providers, but they have to follow a rule: If they can't do something for you, they have to give you an alternative or an option. And then power of veto has to be with someone senior to the guy who's responsible who can without reason turn the project off if they want to," he says.

Batten went in to rescue a massive ERP project in the heavy engineering industry a few years back where he found "people basically walking around in circles; they didn't have a clue what to do". He says he spent a week-and-a-half rewriting the project plan in a way that put the people in the left-hand column and all their tasks on the right side, instead of the other way round. "There was this sort of audible sigh of relief that at last all they had to do was read from left to right, which they were good at, and work out what they had to do when," Batten says.

He says the exercise was invaluable in winnowing out problems people had been long aware of but until then had little incentive to mention. "So we flipped the whole focus," he says. "Project plans are built and easy to manage by the project manager but they are nothing to do with the people who actually have to do the work."

In the rock music documentary Anthem to Beauty, Grateful Dead bass player Phil Lesh, referring to Theodore Sturgeon's invented concept of bleshing, describes how the band, after many years of playing together, came to feel like a single organism. "As a matter of fact, I still feel that I'm a finger on a hand," he says.

For many IT project teams a better analogy might be the proverbial herd of cats. Recently in Australia one consultant sent in to rescue a failing project was shocked when two project team members, meeting face to face for the first time after months of communicating by e-mail, discovered to their mutual amazement that they worked down the corridor from each other.

It would be fantastic if we could get IT project teams to blesh, but even a recognition that project teams are full of human beings who need to be managed would be a healthy start.