Administer and Monitor Project

The roles and efforts of project teams can never be understated. By and large, the project’s success or failure is determined by the quality and capabilities of its team members. How teams are formed and managed therefore has a strong bearing on project performance.

Building Team Roles

Meredith Belbin, a British researcher and management consultant, developed a list of roles that can be used to identify how to build a diverse team and ensure team cohesion to meet project objectives. Ideally, there should be an optimal mix or blend of skills and roles that cover all aspects of projects.

Belbin outlined eight basic roles:

• Coordinator
• Driver
• Finisher
• Implementer
• Monitor-Evaluator
• Originator
• Resource Investigator
• Supporter

Video

Watch the following view to learn more about Belbin’s team roles (now expanded to nine roles) in this YouTube video from Mind Tools Videos: ‘Belbin’s 9 Team Roles’

Belbin's 9 Team Roles - YouTube

For a project to operate effectively, we also need to ensure teams include:

• An environment of honesty and trust
• Effective communication channels
• Role clarity
• Regular meetings review processes
• Effective working group relations
• Effective coordination
• Effective time management
• Conflict management
• Problem-solving capabilities

Team Member Responsibilities

Earlier, we discussed how the importance of developing a project plan includes tools like the RACI chart (see example below) that details tasks and responsibilities across project team members and stakeholders to ensure that activities and processes are not missed when implementing projects.

It is equally important to ensure that team members continue to be clear about what their responsibilities are. This means regular meetings and communications are needed. This can also assist to avoid stress and reduce duplication of work—all good indicators to build effective working relationships among project team members.

Effective meetings are useful for communicating team responsibilities. However, communications can be impacted if meetings are not viewed as a valuable use of people’s time, particularly with time-pressured projects. A few reminders about ensuring meetings add value to projects:

• Be properly organised and have a structure including an agenda
• Ensure that team members receive information that they can use and give feedback on at meetings
• Use meeting forums to identify and care for issues or problems and seek ideas for improvements
• Focus on the project plan to keep the team on track including adopting actions based on results

Information Sharing and Communication at Meetings

Information and knowledge sharing is an important aspect of effective communication. Clear communication involves agreed goals and objectives—essential to any effective team. Project team meetings provide a forum whether through soon or other project apps such as Microsoft teams where ideas can be shared and roles allocated.

Sharing information at meetings also serves the following purpose:

• Clarifying priorities for commencing week
• Checking project milestones and areas for improvements sharing knowledge or information with team members such as updated requirements or changes to legislation
• Identifying resource gaps and areas to fast-track project task completion
• Providing a forum for rewarding good performance
• Addressing problems or issues encountered in projects
• Providing opportunities for creative problem solving and process improvements
• Creating a forum for making decisions on key issues or problems
• Identifying shortfalls or performance gaps or operational issues
• Restating the project vision, goals and objectives to keep on track

Communicating Roles Responsibilities and Task Allocations

Projects, particularly complex ones, can be challenging when role clarity issues arise, and members are confused about their individual responsibilities. This can lead to stress, wastage of resources and inefficiencies like poor time and workload management. It is therefore critical for members to understand what is required of them.

Consider adopting the following strategies to ensure this:

• Provide instructions and guidelines on roles and responsibilities
• Communicate what when and why in terms of responsibilities and obligations
• Communicate reporting lines to the team members
• Specify who members need to report to and the frequency of reporting
• Offer information on resources available to support team members with project delivery

The benefits of role clarification include:

• Ensures conflicts or disputes do not arise between team members that can impact productivity
• Checks tasks and activities have not been missed or bypassed, which can have impacts on the project outcomes
• Allocates work and work activities without duplicating them, in order to maximise the best use of employee or worker time, given project constraints such as budget
• Prevents the risk of budget costs blowout associated with personnel staff

Communication is also important to ensure that goals, targets and expected performance standards such as quality requirements are adhered to and clearly communicated to team members to ensure they have the required understanding. You cannot expect employees to achieve goals and standards including specific KPIs benchmarks if they have not been consulted or involved in a communication and decision-making process.

Maintaining Recordkeeping Systems

Recordkeeping systems play an integral role in ensuring project stakeholders have access to up-to-date information and the status of project progress is visible. Sometimes, there are deficiencies in project management when proper recordkeeping procedures have not been followed. The consequences of poor recordkeeping can impact on your organisation if a third party is involved such as a contract organisation. If there have been concerns about the performance of the party and there is no evidence, then your organisation may find it difficult to enforce a penalty clause or take action to remedy a project problem.

Types of records and information that need to be maintained include:

• Project contracts
• Project plans
• Risk plans
• Project budget
• Stakeholders information
• Project progress reports
• Project administration information (e.g. insurances and legal documents)
• Supplier details

Managing records and files involves three key areas:

• Creation of project-related files
• Storage of project documents
• Archiving or preserving or in some cases destroying project records (the last one may occur if the project is for a government department or there is a requirement to delete files for security).

Note that not every document is a record. Document management is also an important function in project management but may not need to be saved as a record.

Websites

These engineering examples from Think Project and Eqorum highlight the importance of data and information capture through use of quality document management systems:

‘Document Management System’

‘Engineering Document Management’

Features of an effective project document management system include:

• Documents can be easily uploaded, identified, located and accessed
• Documents are periodically reviewed and updated
• Current versions of the documentation are available in various operational areas
• A knowledge repository provides a single source of truth—visible and accessible to project stakeholders
• Real-time information and reports
• Coordination and classification of documents.

Undertake Risk Management

Monitoring projects also is about control such as undertaking risk management functions if risks or problems emerge during the project. Risk management and risk control, therefore, become important elements that also promote effective administration.

Risk Treatment

Detecting and identifying risks and leads to implementing risk treatments. Risk treatments should be documented in an action plan that can be implemented. Communicating risk management processes to project team members and stakeholders also reflects sound project management practice.

It is not feasible to prevent risks from occurring in a project, but we can see to minimise risks to keep them to an acceptable level. It is important to monitor potential risks that arise throughout the project as it is being rolled out. Risks in projects can be anything from safety or health-related risks to quality assurance gaps or errors that occur throughout the systems and processes for the project.

An organisation retaining a level of risk means that we need to monitor risk. Residual risk means retaining an acceptable level as shown in the ALARP model below. It is this area of risk we need to monitor as written in the project risk plan.

Risk monitoring includes reviewing action plans and risk implications surrounding all project activities. The idea about regular monitoring of the risk plan means continually seeking to improve project performance.

The monitoring of risk includes:

• Data collection methods
• Data collection methods
• Checking data is valid or reliable
• Consulting with and reporting to stakeholders
• Identifying ways to mitigate or address risks
• Measuring risks
• Developing strategies to reduce or eliminate risks
• Conducting project audits

Monitoring risk can include reviewing organisational processes and procedures, communicating with internal and external stakeholders about issues, undertaking reviews of the strengths and weaknesses within the project, reviewing critical success factors and goals or objectives, seeking endorsement and authorisation for risk management activities and communicating with relevant parties about existing and suggested adjustments to the risk management process.

Identifying risks involves in-depth consultation meetings with key stakeholders to identify risk issues and document the risks including strategies for improvement. For example, budget risk fit within financial risk, which occurs when there is scope creep, and this requires a review of activities and how to be more efficient to avoid a budget blowout.

Types of risks to monitor include:

• Safety: How activities are undertaken.
• Technical: Systems that might break down or where key project data is lost.
• Financial: Where there are significant cost overruns.
• Personnel: Key personnel allocated to a project result or move into other roles leaving a skills gap.

Implementing a contingency or backup plan should be part of the process to support addressing these types of risks. Analysing sources of risk including data and statistical analysis assists in diagnosing possible reasons behind the risk and supports ways to address the risk.

Quiz