Team Governance: What standards will the team abide by?
Most project teams are populated using staff which come from various functional areas. Realize that you have a matrix structure where one person reports (for a time) to both their work-day boss (functional) and also to the project manager (the unfunctional boss -- just a little joke). Understand the needs for shared information among the people in that triangle.
Rules of Conduct:Set up some rules of conduct. Decide what are the expectations:
- how team members report in or report an absence.
- is there a standard format for reports?
- who needs to know when a part of the project
- changes schedule (ahead or behind)
- revises the scope (doing more or doing less than originally planned)
- needs more staff or tools?
- Does everybody have to know everything and at what point do the knowers need that information?
- How will team members talk to each other? Does it all have to be on an archived listserv? Are there any legals involved in public meetings or record-keeping?
Metrics: figure out how you're going to measure progress, success, etc.
"Metrics drive behavior! Carefully select your metrics
because the organization focuses on the accomplishment
of that which is measured."
Rigor: Decide which standards of rigor should be used for which parts of the project. Some parts of the project may need a higher level of intensity or detail than others may need. Be sure you know which are which so you're not dedicating a huge amount of time to a less needy phase or part of the project. Be prepared to change the amount of rigor applied within a single project at different times in that project.
Use a Constraint Matrix to guide decisions.I just love this one. It's so simple and clean and easy and clear and gives such lovely structure and consistency to the decision-making processes! I suspect it's something we've known to do all along, but this just makes it slicker than greased... uh, petroleum jelly.
Guide your decisions by what parts of the project can "give" when things aren't going exactly as planned. Can you change the scope of what you're doing just a little bit in order to get it done on time? Can you add a bunch more staff to get it done on time? This would be represented by this matrix:
Most constrained Moderately constrained Least constrained Scope X Schedule X Resources X Or, is it most important that the whole project be done as it was defined, but you can take a while longer if you need to, and maybe add a few more staff and buy a couple more computers to help get it done. This is what that looks like:
You can have only one X per row, and each row needs to have an X. (I don't know what you do if two things have the same force: that is, what happens when the project absolutely must be done by Valentine's day and the customer wants it exactly how it was spec'd out originally or she won't pay. Guess you just force one of those into a moderate box. Probably the scope might change a wee bit if this thing has to be built and display-able by Valentine's day. Maybe we could use a painted spray-on foam instead of casting metal for it.
Most constrained Moderately constrained Least constrained Scope X Schedule X Resources X
Determine whether there are inherited policies and procedures in our organiazation which will affect our team's work. Are we required to use pcs rather than Macs, even if Macs are better suited to this task? Are there already defined procedures we're supposed to use? (Example: UO Library values assessment, so we all know we need to consider how much pre- and post-assessment each of our Initiatives require.)
Return to
How
To
index