Everything in the world is a project-several problems in project Black Hole Management

Everything in the world is a project-Several Problems in "Project Black Hole" Management

In today's society, everything is a project, and everything will become a project. The specific execution unit of the project-the project team is a formal group of individuals who collaborate for a specific purpose. Its fundamental mission is to work together to achieve the objectives of a specific project and accomplish the tasks identified by a specific project under the direct leadership of the project manager to coordinate and effectively work. The success or failure of the project team determines the final success or failure of the project.

Currently, most projects, especially in the IT industry, suffer from the "black hole": projects cannot be completed on schedule, the work of project partners is difficult to coordinate, and users' needs change frequently. Because the project has a clear time limit, in the project implementation process, whether the project can be completed on time has become a key and most obvious standard to measure the quality of the project. However, due to the unclear impact of project managers on Project Team stability, conflicts, meetings, and stress on productivity, poor management leads to a decline in project team productivity, project Progress is slow, and the actual progress of the project cannot keep up with the schedule.

1. Impact of Personnel Flow on project team productivity
As a social phenomenon, the increasing mobility of personnel is gradually accepted and recognized by people. The Project Manager also believes that appropriate personnel flows in the project team can be understood, and even the team's adaptability can be enhanced, as long as the same technical personnel can be hired in time to replace him, this will not affect the productivity and progress of the project team. However, in fact, the flow of team members will weaken the productivity of the team in many ways.

1.1 impact of staff turnover on available team members
Assume that a project team of N (assumed to be January) members has been working together for two years since 100. Some new personnel policies introduced in March 1 resulted in a fixed staff exit rate R, assuming that the loss of N (assumed as 8) individuals per month. Whenever a person leaves, the project manager immediately hires another person to replace him and provides C (assumed as 2) months of training for the new person, then the newcomers can be integrated into the project. This management scenario can be represented in Figure 1. So, does the team have 100 people available in the project cycle?

Intuition may tell us that when a person quits, he will immediately hire one to replace him. Although at the beginning, the personnel will be trained, but when the training is over, after a new employee joins the team, the number of available members of the Team will gradually reach the original level-100. But it is not so optimistic. Through simulationProgramRun, you can get the number of people available for the team in different time periods. 1:

 
The simulated output shows that the number of available teams dropped sharply in the first two months. By May 1, the number of available teams will fluctuate around 84, however, it is no longer possible to restore the original team to 100 people. This is because only personnel exit and hire new personnel for training in July and July, and no personnel is added to the project work of the team. By July, some newcomers have completed two months of training, invested in project work, and exited. The combined effect of these two is: although the overall number of people in the team has been maintained at 100, some new people are always being trained, so that the number of available people in the team can only fluctuate at 84 (average number of available people, it cannot reach the original 100 people. It can be seen that the mobility of project team members has a great impact on the number of available team members, which can be expressed by the following formula:
Ne = r * C

Where

Egative effect, negative impact;
R-staff exit rate
C. Training Cycle

1.2 communication losses
The flow of personnel in the team directly results in a decrease in the number of available members of the team, thus affecting the team's productivity. In order to keep the total number of teams unchanged as much as possible, the project manager immediately hires one person to replace him when losing one person. However, this can only maintain a low-level balance between the number of teams and ensure the productivity of 84 members in the team. After training, new personnel are involved in the project team's work process, resulting in communication losses, this affects the productivity of the team and makes the overall production of the team less than the productivity of the 84-member team that has already cooperated with each other.

The initial impact of trained personnel joining the development team is negative. On the first day, this new employee could not do anything useful. In order to learn and communicate, he would also take up the time of others, reducing the productivity of the team, that is, the loss of communication. As the time spent working together gets longer and longer, the team can gradually eliminate communication losses due to a potential of the team-cohesion effect. After many things, the team will become more and more robust, and the appreciation can overcome the loss of communication, so that as a whole, it can be simpler and better than a single individual, as shown in figure 2.
 

 
Therefore, the project manager must establish the flow of team members, which is an important cause of low team productivity. The project management needs to maintain the stability of the team through various aspects.

Enhance the team cohesion to maintain the stability of the team. First, we need to enhance the attractiveness between members. Members share the same interests, have a harmonious relationship, and care for, love and help each other. Second, they need to enhance the attractiveness of Team activities to members. The content, form, and frequency of Team activities are suitable for Members, so they are more attractive. In the end, they are more attractive to meeting the individual needs of members. Meeting the various material and psychological needs of individual members is the most important condition for enhancing the attractiveness of the group.
In order to minimize communication losses, unless necessary, do not join a team by yourself: Find a team that has already been formed. At the same time, we should also take the team together-well-prepared and willing to accept new jobs-as one of the gains of the project.

2. failed to resolve the conflict in time
As long as there are multiple participants in the project development process, there must be conflicts. However, sometimes the Project Manager lacks an information exchange channel between members of the project team, or fails to properly grasp the conflicts between members, and fails to resolve the conflicts in a timely manner, which affects the project progress.

Conflicts should be taken seriously and resolved as soon as possible. It is best to set up a fast and convenient information channel between managers and team members before the project starts, such as the project opinion manager mailbox.

Conflicts in project management do not mean the lack of professional ethics, but the differences between the methods for solving problems. For conflicts, it is difficult to achieve the desired results through formal negotiation, because negotiation is usually a zero-sum game, And what I get is what you lose; informal mediation can easily solve the problem, that is, a third party that does not involve a conflict can help both parties reach a consensus.

Mediation should be conducted before the conflict is fully formed, and even before the project starts, we should first announce that everyone's "win" is valued. When any conflict has just emerged and has not become apparent, some trained mediators are needed to tell the two sides of the conflict that you are not both hostile, you are standing on the same side. What is wrong with you is this problem. In this way, the two sides of the conflict may quickly reach a meaningful consensus. The two sides of the conflict begin to understand and respect the needs of the other party, and try to think about the scheme they have never thought about before. Each step of negotiation will deepen the trust between each other and lead to more chances of success.

3. meetings often have no clear agenda
In the process of project management, especially when the project is facing great difficulties, there are a large number of meetings that attempt to speed up the progress of the project without agenda determination. These meetings are intended to solve the problem. However, since the organizers themselves do not know which part of the team is facing a problem, they often fail to formulate a clear agenda, the result is that there will be a lot of participants, because these people will think before attending the meeting: Is it completely safe not to attend the meeting? The discussion was fruitless because too many participants made it difficult to implement the problem. In the end, the valuable time and energy and confidence of the participants were wasted.
 
To avoid wasting the project development time and progress, we recommend that you follow the following two principles when holding meetings during the project:

A. a public agenda for the meeting. Create an open agenda for each meeting. Every meeting should be as short as possible so that people can choose to participate in part of the Agenda as needed. The meeting should be conducted in strict accordance with the agenda, in this way, people do not have to worry that they will not participate in the meeting with their related topics.

B. There was a small ceremony before. At the beginning of each meeting, we had a small ceremony. If appropriate, everyone can be noticed to maintain the value of streamlining the meeting and the objectives and ideals of the project. The ceremony can be divided into five steps: one is that the host tells everyone that even reducing one attendee is also valuable; the other is that others agree to the ceremony; the third is that the host according to the Meeting situation, select a person who should not waste time, give him freedom, and help them save valuable time. 4. Tell everyone his hopes for the meeting before leaving; 5. Others agree to leave; 6. This person leaves the venue. Repeat steps 2 to 6 until no one can reduce the number. At this time, the person who stays at the venue will be related to the problem and is eager to solve the problem.

4. Progress through stress
It seems that project development cannot be completed within the specified time. When the project time is too short, the Project Manager will try his best to tighten the screws-overload members of the project team, allow developers to work overtime, and attempt to seize the progress through pressure.

In fact, increasing overtime only reduces productivity. Although project developers like the pressure, at least when the pressure is not great. Proper stress, or even overtime, can be useful strategies that enable employees to concentrate and make them feel the importance of their work. However, if the pressure is too high and the overtime time is too long, the employees will feel tired and exhausted until they are discouraged. If the pressure is higher, they will leave the project. Even those who have not left the project team cannot think about problems faster under overload. These have seriously affected the team's creativity and enthusiasm, thus reducing the team's productivity.

Although project managers know that increasing overtime can only reduce productivity, as Tom DiMarco says: "The reason why managers put so much pressure may be because they don't know what to do, or, you are discouraged by the difficulties of other methods."

To sum up, in order to ensure the efficient operation of the project team and ensure that the project is completed on schedule, we need to manage the project team well: we do our best to maintain the stability of the team members and resolve the conflicts in the middle, A clear agenda should be arranged for each meeting, and the pressure on the team should be moderate.