Crescendus™

Practical Brilliance SeriesStraight Talk on Project Management Execution

JUNE 2014. | Copyright Crescendus™ 2014. All Rights Reserved.______________________________________________________________________________Project Execution- Dealing with multiple-departmental employeesworking on a Project.

STATUS QUO ISSUES & PROBLEMS:In most companies, resources from different departments are pooled together or shared towork on critical projects. During the initial phases of the project, everyone is excited about theopportunity to collaborate and want to be "in the loop" on everything. The managers, directorsand Vice President's of the various departments get together and talk about detailed tasks,KPIs, GANTT charts and also hand-off of various tasks and critical path initiatives. Also, forvarious tasks, leaders are also appropriately assigned but the leaders do not have directauthority over the team members, since they are managed by their departmental managers.This is usually the case in most companies, and definitely at mid to large firms that operateunder the matrix structure.

As the year progresses, the above employees keep being pulled into their own intradepartmental activities and tasks governed by their own managers and directors. When thishappens, inter departmental priorities take the back seat and most of the previously agreedupon timelines are delayed/shifted. This leads to execution frustration and never ending seriesof meetings with various stakeholders and political power plays between the departments. Theend result usually follows the " we need to work together" theme and sets off new set ofstanding meetings for the rest of the year!

SOLUTIONS:1. Project Performance & Compensation Reviews- On critical projects, inter departmental teammembers should report to the task managers, and these task managers should be given 100%HR authority over the performance reviews and compensation incentives of each of their teammembers.

For example, if a marketing employee is working 80% on core marketing department tasks and

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20% on multi-departmental tasks, the performance review of the 20% portion should be fullycontrolled by the project task leader. For this 20%, the original marketing department headshouldn't be involved in performance review or compensation evaluation. The departmentheads should just focus their authority over the 80% portion of the employee's core tasks.

When you do this, the project task leaders will be able to manage and execute more efficiently.

2. Organization Structure- CEOs and CFOs should make it clear that employees work for thecompany and not limited to departments. For critical projects, they should embrace theconcept of annual floating employees that can be pulled into various projects (with differentreporting supervisors) and tasks, depending upon annual strategic goals and priorities. TheExecutive Team should direct the HR structure to accomodate the above flexibility.

3. CEO Intervention- Get involved in critical projects and attend critical path initiative projectmeetings. Such things can not be delegated simply to your Executives. Use these meetings toalso get frank feedback from the various project managers and team members. At minimum,attend 2-3 meetings/month and set aside 2-3 full days to go over critical deliverables. Don'tforget that we are talking about critical path initiatives that have the potential to severelyimpact the performance of the company.

4. Time Management- This really starts at the top with the CEO & the Executive team. Usually,within annual strategy meetings, most of the Executives try to pile up 10-12 core initiatives withseveral sub-initiatives that are broken down further into departmental and employee tasks. Thisis the most important stage where the CEO should challenge their Executives on Tradeoffs andrestrict core initiatives to a manageable number. We find that most Executives do not like to cutinitiatives because they want to maintain power and control over financial and employeeresources. This is the root cause of all time management issues.

If there is time management problem, challenge and hold your VP's, Directors and Managersaccountable. There is no point pushing the blame to the reporting employees since they do nothave full control on the tradeoffs. During performance reviews, for every time managementchallenge or delay, hold the VP and Director accountable since they didn't prioritize initiatives,projects and tasks. Do not wait till mid year to change course in case things are not working.Remember, the CEO and the Executive Team have the right to re-prioritize initiatives at anytime. It is better to say that we overestimated our capabilities early in the year and changecourse rather than blindly staying the course and hoping for the best (even if you know that it iswishful thinking).

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