Foolproof Process To Manage Your Team Throughout The Project

Managing a team throughout a project can be a tough ride. Managing multiple teams can be even more tricky.

As a project manager or a business owner, you have to establish a good relationship between your team and the client as well as between the team members themselves.

The question often is:

How to meet client’s expectations, deliver the project, and keep your employees motivated and efficient?

The key here is to find a perfect balance between the workload and your available resources.

At Teamdeck — our resource management software — we’ve worked out a solution based on the best practices of project management, that leads to proper employee allocation. It helps us to keep our programmers focused on the right tasks, at the same time delivering projects on time and of good quality.

Today we’re going to share this approach with you.

Get it right from the beginning

First things first, you need to do your best to better know your client, their needs, challenges, and expectations.

To do that, we start every project with a kick-off meeting with a client.

At the beginning, think about your previous experiences with similar projects. What have you accomplished, what pitfalls you’ve had to overcome and how have you done it.

Then compare that to your new client’s project — can you see any similarities? Can you address it with previous solutions?

Now is the time to talk to your client. Set up a meeting or a call to define the project scope, responsibilities, and list of priorities. Introduce the ideas you’ve come up with while researching your past projects.

But most importantly, set the rules on how you will communicate. How often will you hold meet-up calls or deliver update emails? What is the requested follow-up time?

Agree on the payment method and define the person from the client’s side responsible for evaluating the work and confirming that project was delivered.

Key takeaway: At this point you should have addressed goals, plans, challenges, timelines and how your project will be delivered.

Ok, so now you have every informations you need to properly start a project, right? It is a time to introduce these details to your team.

Outline the roles and people behind them. Be inclusive about this process so that your resources can fully commit to the project.

Maintain the visibility

Again, make sure everyone understands their responsibilities.

To do so, set the roles within the project, define for how long will the resources be needed, who exactly is working on your project. Then set the resource calendar that includes:

• availability of all resources (take time zones into account when working with remote teams)
• other work, commitments and tasks
• planned days off for each team member
• local holidays during which people from different countries will not be available

Creating a RACI matrix will make responsibility flow clearer for everybody. RACI stands for:

• Responsible
• Accountable
• Consulted
• Informed

It helps to eliminate role confusion, proper resource allocation, re-allocation in case of future pivots, and easier project onboarding for new team members.

This is what the matrix looks like:

Source: Smartsheet

To better understand who’s working on your project and which tasks they will do best, use skills matrix.

It is a simple table that shows employee’s skills and proficiency level, so it is easier for project manager to determine whether they are the right person for a given assignment, or not.

You can also use a skills matrix to guide employee development.

Learn on how to start of a project, manage it, and choose the essential tools from our free ebook on best practices of resource management.

Align project estimation and capacity

During the entire project you should constantly monitor the workload. Avoid overbooking and employee underutilization, as both are detrimental to the project progress and employee motivation.

There is a chance, however, that no matter how hard you try to map out the process, somewhere along the line you’ll stumble upon issues such as conflicting bookings when more people are needed than available.

You can try to resolve them using these resource optimisation techniques:

1. Resource leveling

Whenever you see any overtime booking, you may want to divide the activities and move some of them to the upcoming days/weeks. This way, you avoid overbooking.

The downside is, however, that the project path changes and there are usually delays in the whole process.

2. Resource smoothing

This technique should be used after resource leveling.

It allows you to make use of the slack that was created in the leveling process so that the hours are more evenly distributed.

3. Remember about the brooks’ Law

When you’re running late with the project and/or you’re pressed by your management to come up with a solution to this precarious situation, it is tempting to simply add extra resources to your team.

Keep in mind that new people will need their share of time for onboarding, it will significantly increase the cost, and could even impact the productivity of the core team.

This phenomenon was summed up by Fred P. Brooks Jr in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

4. Beware of the death march

A death march could be a project in which people have to work insane hours but it’s still doomed to fail. Team members are following it against their better judgement.

This is a tricky case because death march projects could seem exciting at the beginning — a tight deadline might be motivating.

While potentially it’s possible to “steal time” for the short term, in the long run death marches are deadly to your team morale and the final outcome.

5. Try to negotiate

It might happen that you will need to negotiate with other project managers over the resources you both need.

Decide together as to what should be taken into account when deciding which way the key resource goes (commercial gain, time priority) and try to accommodate for the change if it happens — maybe you can shift the timeline of your project to make it possible for certain people to take part in it after all.

Conclusion

As you can see, the key is to not only start the project with as much informations as you can get, but to monitor the project continuously and adjust resources to the workload.

It is, however, easier to set and maintain the proper flow, if you better align client’s needs, project scope, and your available resources.

Resource optimisation techniques, at the end, will help you with dealing with managerial issues that may arise during the development.

Want more project management tips and tricks? See our free ebook on best practices of resource management.

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