SPM Unit 5 Notes
SPM Unit 5 Notes
SPM Unit 5 Notes
Managing People
Understanding Behavior
Handling of projects with practical experience becomes a vital role in the aspect
of project management.
The managers must be able to decide on whether it is better to have experienced
staff or get an expert advice.
There are numerous theories defined to explain people’s behavior.
The theories are structures based on “If A is the situation then B is likely to be the
solution”.
Other than the structures, there a wide range of influences on a situation which
are invisible to the users which makes it difficult to decide on the solution.
Organizational Behavior
Work Objectives
Fredrick Taylor analyzed the productive way of doing things and trained the
workers with these objectives:
To select the best people for the job
To instruct them in the best methods
To give them incentives based on their performance
These work objectives defined by Taylor emphasis exclusively on the financial
basis of the staff motivation and performance-related pay.
This encouragement to the staff will help the project group to work together in
achieving their goals which ultimately increases the productivity.
People may be motivated by money, but they are motivated by other factors as
well.
were drawn.
According to Gerald Weinberg, “Most programmers prefer to work alone
where they are not disturbed by other people”.
Recruitment Process
There is a lot of stress for every project manager about choosing the right
people to make up their team.
Recruitment is an organizational responsibility process of selecting the
person form their organization.
Meredith Belbin categorizes people in recruiting process into two different
types.
Eligible candidates are those persons who have the right information
needed by the organization in paper, i.e. the curriculum vitaecontains
the right number or years and right paper qualifications.
Suitable candidates can actually do the job well but are not officially
eligible. Ideal candidates once given a post are likely to be more loyal
towards the welfare of the organization.
Actual skills have to be taken into account while selecting a person rather
than mere eligibility.
The recruitment policy must avoid discrimination of race, gender, age or
irrelevant disabilities.
A recruitment process must include:
Creation of job specification: type of task that has to be carried out
must be documented and agreed.
Creation of job profile: constructs a profile of the person needed to
carry out the job with qualities, qualifications, education and
experience.
Obtaining applicants: placing an advertisement within the organization
or the local press to get a maximum number of potential applicants.
Examine Curriculum Vitae: all the received CV’s are compared with the
job holder profile and if satisfied are called for interview.
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Motivation
Motivation Theories
There are various theories formulated by different persons for motivating
the people to work. They are,
Taylorist Model
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory
Expectancy Theory of Motivation.
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Taylorist Model
In this model, Taylor emphasis on the piece-rates and day-rates.
Piece-rates are those where the workers are paid a fixed sum for each single
item they produce whereas day-rates refer to the daily pay that is given to the
workers on a timely basis.
The tendency towards dispersed or virtual projects where the staffs either
work in organization or work at home has a difference in the payment based
on time worked.
The amount paid to the workers will not directly relate to maximize the output
in order to maximize their income.
The amount of output will normally depend on the working group and not
based on an individual.
A reward based on piece-rates is directly proportional to the work produced.
But a support team cannot be adjudged by a single person, instead it is group
activity and the reward must be given to the group as a whole.
In Taylorist model, the reward system makes excessive distinctions between
co-workers that result in damaging morale and productivity.
This can be balanced by giving bonuses to project team members after
completion of a successful project.
1. Physiological Needs: These are the basic needs for sustaining human life itself,
such as food, water, warmth, shelter, and sleep. Maslow felt that until these
needs are satisfied to the degree necessary to maintain life, other needs will not
motivate people.
2. Security or Safety Needs: These are the needs to be free of physical danger and
of the fear of losing a job property, food, or shelter.
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3. Affiliation or Social Needs: Since people are social beings; they need to belong,
to be accepted by others. It includes friendship, the need to love and be loved,
socializing, etc.
4. Esteem Needs: Once people begin to satisfy their need to belong; they tend to
want to
be held in esteem both by themselves and by others. This kind of need produces
such satisfactions as respect, power, prestige, status, and self-confidence.
Oldman and Hackman coined a rule that managers should group together the
elements of tasks that is carried out must be meaningful and satisfying
assignments.
The satisfaction of any job will depend on the following factors:
Skill variety
Task identity
Task significance
Autonomy
Feedback
Elements of Tasks
Factors that make the job meaningful to the person who is doing it are skill
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Managers must involve the following measures to enhance the job design: .
Job enlargement
Job enrichment
Job enlargement is exactly reverse of specialization where the person doing
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Ethics relates to the moral obligation to respect the rights and interests of others –
goesbeyond strictly legal responsibilities.
Social Responsibility
Small companies also have an obligation to protect the community. For
example, the owner of a small chemical company needs to communicate
certain dangers to the community when explosions or other disasters occur.
The owner must also maintain certain safety standards for protecting nearby
residents from leaks that affect the water or air quality. There are state and
federal laws that protect people from unethical environmental practices.
Business owners who violate these laws may face stiff penalties. They may
also be shut down.
Financial Ethics
Business owners must run clean operations with respect to finances,
investing and expanding their companies. For example, organizations must not
bribe state legislators for tax credits or special privileges. Insider trading is also
prohibited. Insider trading is when managers or executives illegally apprise
investors or outside parties of privileged information affecting publicly traded
stocks, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The information
helps some investors achieve greater returns on their investments at the
expense of others. Executives in small companies must strive to help all
shareholders earn better returns on their money. They must also avoid collusive
arrangements with other companies to deliberately harm other competitors.
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Considerations
A small company's organizational ethics can also include taking care of
employees with mental illnesses or substance abuse problems, such as drug
and alcohol dependency. Ethical business owners help their employees
overcome these types of problems when possible. They often put them through
employee advisor programs, which involves getting them the treatment they
need. Employees may have issues that lead to these types of problems.
Therefore, they deserve a chance to explain their situations and get the help
they need.
Professional ethics
Professionals have knowledge about the technical domain that the
general public does not. Ethical duty of the expert to warn lay people of the risks
involved in a particular course of action. Many professions, or would be
professions, have codes of conduct for their members
Working in teams
Not all people involved in the development process like to work in groups.
But major software projects always have to work in groups and many people
do not like to work in groups.
Any organization involved in the development process will have various
departments reflecting its structure.
Formal groups can be formulated based on the different departments and
task groups can be formed based on specific tasks carried.
Task group can contain different people from different departments to work
together to carry out a specific task.
Every task group formed for specific activities to be carried out are dissolved
once the task is completely achieved.
Becoming a team
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Making people work together is the most difficult task that the project
manager has to carefully handle.
A team cannot perform instantly; it has to develop over time.
Individual Characteristics
Any project team must be formed with the best mix of different personalities.
Belbin formulated the need of balanced teams based on individual
characteristics of people.
Chair: these people must be good at conducting meetings, must be
calm, strong and tolerant. Need not be excellent leaders.
Plant: these people must be good at generating ideas and giving
potential solution to problems.
Monitor-Evaluator: they must be good evaluators and best in selecting
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Group Performance
There is a strong question raised often: “Are groups more effective than
individuals working alone?”.
It is the responsibility of the project manager to distinguish the tasks which
are supposed to be carried out together and those tasks to be carried out by
individuals.
Some works yield better results when worked together as a team, while some
others are slowed down because of the work be compartmentalized based on
individuals.
There are four different ways of categorizing group tasks. They are:
Additive Tasks: in this the effort of every person are added to reach the
final result. People involved in additive tasks are interchangeable.
Compensatory Tasks: here, the judgements of individual group
members are taken and the results are then averaged. These result in
effective group work rather than the efforts of individuals.
Disjunctive Tasks: these tasks have only one correct solution to the
task. Here, if someone comes with a solution and everybody in the
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Decision making
Categories of Decisions
Team Structures
Department Structure
In project life cycle phases there are separate teams for development and
maintenance.
Matrix form of departmentalization can also be formed where there are two
managers namely project manager and programming manager. The project
manager deals with the day-to-day activities while the programming manager
focuses on future career development.
Egoless programming suggests that the programmers and the programming
team leaders should read other people’s programs so that the programs become
a common property to both.
Team Structure
Team structure addresses the issue of organization of the individual project
teams. There are mainly three formal team structures:
Chief programmer,
Democratic, and
The mixed control team organizations
If the number of groups is larger, then the work will be slower because of
increased communication. So large projects must be formalized and must be
represented in an centralized structure.
One way to avoid this, to reduce the number of people and giving them more
support to make the work done which led to the formulation of chief programmer
team.
The chief programmer defines the specification, design, code, tests and
documents the entire software.
The chief programmer can have a co-pilot who can assist in writing some code
and discussions.
An editor can be used to write up the documentation drafted by the chief
programmer, along with a program clerk who maintains the actual code and a
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Chief programmer
Team Members
Advantages
The chief programmer team is subject to single point failure since too
much responsibility and authority is assigned to the chief programmer.
Since the chief programmer carries out many tasks individually, there is a
danger of information overload on the chief programmer
The democratic team structure, as the name implies, does not enforce
any formal team hierarchy. Decisions are taken based on discussions, where any
member is free to discuss with any other matters.Typically, a manager provides the
administrative leadership. At different times,different members of the group provide
technical leadership.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
The mixed team organization, as the name implies, draws upon the ideas
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The democratic connections are shown as dashed lines and the reporting
structure is shown using solid arrows.
The mixed control team organization is suitable for large team sizes.
The democratic arrangement at the senior engineer’s level is used to
decomposethe problem into small parts. Each democratic setup at the
programmer level attempts solution to a single part. Thus, this team
organization is eminently
suited to handle large and complex programs.
This team structure is extremely popular and is being used in many software
development companies.
Virtual Teams
Communication genres
Face-to-face contacts
Communication plans
glossary may define and include samples of templates, reports and forms that the
project manager will use to communicate information.
The result of the communication process could be documented in a table with the
following column headings.
Leadership