People or process? : At times very tough to choose one over the other. Every project manager come across some challenges throughout the life cycle of the project. There is a difference between managing them and managing them successfully in the most appropriate way. A good project manager would ensure industry best practices to ensure the success of the project.If you have found yourself in a situation where the process seems to change, accountabilities keep changing, people management became a challenge then perhaps you have a people, process and technology problem. It is essential to align all 3 in a correct order.
- People – who are they, identify all, their roles and responsibilities, who owns the process, their key competency, how critical they are for your project, how critical they are to the organization, what is the level of involvement, how committed they are to the tasks assigned to them.
- Process – a process can be defined as starting with a trigger event that creates a chain of actions including to and fro approvals that results in something in the end. Processes are necessary and if not followed results in project failure or some other disaster. But some processes are there just for the sake of it, without any benefit either to the company or its employees. So it is the duty of all the senior employees to ask management to reevaluate all the existing processes. As there is a possibility that some old processes no longer fits in to your organization due to technology and other changes thereafter. Some key recommendations are check all the processes at high level and then from end to end by moving into more detail to capture the various layers involved and various exceptions. Also check if they are standardized, if they are reliable, and how often you experience process failures. At the same time check if you can cut short the duration of certain task.
- Technology – Ifright set of people are aligned, and the process, if existing verified else developed and clarified, technology can be applied to ensure consistently in application of the process and help to keep the process on track. All three are interrelated and can impact each other to a great extent.
At times approval processes which were created years ago, not reviewed or revised after that, can be revised with a justification. This way you will not only create awareness but you can also back it up with facts.When it comes to make a choice between people and process, it is recommended to choose people but ensure that it is in the interest of your organization. In Agile value people over process is explained in detail. Here’s an agile-approach to attacking a project:
- You are the project manager and succeeded in forming, highly skilled team.
- The team starts with proper documentation.
- The customer is included in all decision-making and they are the part of the team
- They start executing, they’re transparent to all the stakeholders.
- They make necessary adjustments as a team and inform all the stakeholders.
- They explore all the risks to the project and deliver the best features to the client when they need it.
In agile, it’s not about the documentation, planning or pre-work. It’s more about the people which includes the customer. Customer and team member work like one team. They inspire each other, work together, understand each otherand deliver together. They are self-driven and honest. It’s about discussions and transparency regarding project state, progress, and trade-offs.Any approach that allows the project teams to think and respond with common sense to each and every unique requirement or any that involve true engagement of its people, can be defined as being agile.
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