Introduction
Effective leadership skills are crucial in project management since leaders determine the overall project success. Project managers or leaders are responsible for overseeing and making vital decisions, which can determine the success or failure of projects. Effective project management relies on people with astounding leadership skills. The lack of good leaders who are capable of managing projects leads to unsuccessful completion. The key goals and responsibilities of project managers are to ensure the successful completion of projects. Project managers carry immense weight on their shoulders in making effective decisions. Whereas some individuals possess leadership qualities naturally, it is crucial to learn and adapt to other leadership skills. These would ensure that the leadership approach by people matches their styles and personality (Baker, 2020). The paper is about leading and managing an HR project.
Types of Project Manager Powers
Project managers use distinct types of powers throughout their careers. When it comes to HR projects, reward and expert power would be the most relevant. Reward power utilizes positive monetary and non-financial tools. Many project managers cannot utilize financial incentives. As such, they can offer feedback to functional managers concerning performance, which would be the foundation for determining increases in salaries. Also, project managers can finance training and avail other perks (Baker, 2020). From a non-financial standpoint, they can reward individuals by assigning them to tasks that offer high visibility while at the same time allowing them to participate in the decision-making process. Regarding expert power, it revolves around the expertise, knowledge credentials, or education of a person. The project managers who possess these traits can attain significant power in this regard (Woolard, 2018). Expert power allows project managers to win the respect and trust of their teams based on those traits.
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Outcomes or Issues in Project Management
Irrespective of the availability of numerous resources, training materials, project management tools, and flexible strategies, organizations continue to face immense issues and challenges in managing projects. Lack of communication is a major issue in project management. Effective communication plays a crucial role in the successful completion of a project. Project managers should have transparent and timely communication methods that would ensure to involve all stakeholders. Communication serves as a major issue in project management. Miscommunication affects the performance of teams negatively, which might result in delayed projects. To address the issue, project managers should rely on several collaborative as well as a project management software to ensure all parties remain updated (Sanz-Llopis & Ostermann, 2020). The collaborative tools would allow managers to undertake their duties effectively while at the same time ensuring increased accountability and transparency in the project and within teams.
Insufficient skills of the team members also serve as an issue in project management. The performance of projects highly relies on the skill levels of the individuals. Project managers can create an ideal atmosphere, although the team might lack the needed skills to handle the existing problem, leading a project to fail. The issue is significant in project management while solving it would require foresight and experience. Project managers can deal with the issue by pre-determining the required competencies and skills for project management (Sanz-Llopis & Ostermann, 2020). They should also assess the existing workforce to determine whether a project would require extra staff or not.
The issue of inadequate risk management faces project management practice as well. Project managers should have the foresight of recognizing probable 'what if' situations and devise the appropriate contingency plans. Various projects fail to go according to plan due to the existence of various variables, which create unlimited possibilities. Addressing the problem would require project managers to introduce alternative plans, which the team would adopt when a project becomes uncontrollable (Sanz-Llopis & Ostermann, 2020). Instituting a system for managing project risks would assist in identifying risk types and alleviate them.
Moreover, limited stakeholder engagement hinders effective project management. Project managers should have the ability to ensure all stakeholders remained aligned to the same organizational goals while having a clear project vision. Failure to involve clients in the process would result in major issues during the project's final stages. Thus, it is crucial to consider client feedback while ensuring to keep them updated during the project (Sanz-Llopis & Ostermann, 2020). Here, project managers should invite clients as well as other stakeholders to participate in project management decisions to ensure their active participation in shaping the project.
Challenges in Leading Virtual or Global Project Teams
The present project management environment is presenting project managers with challenges related to managing virtual or global project teams. Despite the ability to choose the brightest and best project teams despite location, various challenges emerge when it comes to managing virtual or global teams that hinder project success. Understanding the issues would play a crucial role in preventing broader issues from emerging. A major challenge that exists in this regard is the lack of structure. Lack of a defined structure usually places project teams at disadvantages. Thus, when working with global or virtual teams, it would be crucial to review procedures and processes constantly to remain efficient in project management. Project managers should undertake a workflow analysis to assist them in understanding how their processes work better. They should have clearly defined global standards as well as online workflows, which would support their processes (Abyad, 2017). Various online tools exist that would allow project teams worldwide to collaborate easily, ensuring project success.
The issue of distrust also serves as a challenge facing project managers when leading virtual or global project teams. When an organization spends money but the project teams do not see where it goes, distrust emerges in an organization. Project teams might realize their project managers do not respond quickly and start believing their work more than others do. Suddenly, many team members feel defensive and withdrawn. Distrust is among the major challenges surrounding global and virtual project teams. From this perspective, project managers should ensure their project management tools are transparent. Doing so would allow them to see the data regarding the contributions of the project teams every week (Abyad, 2017). Increased transparency on how the amount of work project team members handle establishes trust in an organization, leading to successful project completion.
Communication Management Plan
During the planning phase of a project, it is crucial to have a communication management plan, which would define the key requirements for the project. One area to emphasize is on the plan's purpose and approach. Here, a project manager should describe the plan to deeply, give the reason for its existence, and how the project would be implemented. The area should serve as a summary section while it would assist in capturing the essence of the plan's details. An additional area to consider in the plan is communication goals and objectives. The project manager should define the expectations of the communication plan. It would be several things while depending on project expectations. These should emphasize educating and updating the parties that the project affects (Pirju, 2018). The plan can emphasize areas such as increasing knowledge on the project and its importance, offer stakeholders feedback opportunities, and create dialogue between project teams and key stakeholders.
Also, the communication management plan should detail the communication role. Communication would not emanate from a single individual during the project. Thus, the project manager should define all roles together with their conforming communication responsibilities. The key parties to consider here would include project sponsors, project managers, steering team, management team, project team members, and project lead. Furthermore, incorporating communication tools and methods would be crucial in project communication management. The project manager should detail the tools to use and ways of delivering messages between the project goals. The project manager should incorporate several means of communicating the messages while the selected methods and tools should be the ones that allow the project teams to understand what is being communicated. The project manager should consider the receiver of the information when creating the communication content and the method of delivery. The methods that provide project team members opportunities for offering feedback and asking questions would provide real value to the project. The different communication tools to utilize would comprise of status reports, meeting summaries, newsletters, surveys, formal presentations, and Intranet or Internet Web Pages (Pirju, 2018). These approaches would ensure effective communication management during the project.
Conclusion
In conclusion, project management in the Human Resource field is crucial to ensuring project success. Understanding the different types of project manager powers is crucial to determining the ideal power to utilize for specific project situations. Also, it is crucial to have an understanding of the various issues that revolve around project management, such as lack of communication, insufficient skills of the team members, inadequate risk management, and limited stakeholder engagement, which would assist in devising effective solutions to project management. Moreover, leading virtual or global project teams presents challenges, such as lack of structure and distrust, which hinders effective project performance among diverse teams. From this perspective, it is crucial to devise an adequate communication management plan that would assist in communicating the various issues that surround the project. This way, it would be possible to welcome recommendations, feedbacks, and comments on how to make the project better from the perspectives of diverse stakeholders associated with the project.
References
Abyad, A. (2017). Globalization challenges in project management. Middle East Journal of Business, 12 (4), 10-19.
Baker, B. (2020). Power, leadership and culture as drivers of project management. American Journal of Management, 20 (1), 9-30.
Pirju, I. S. (2018). The importance on communication in project management strategy. Acta Universitatis Danubius: Communication, 12 (2), 152-161.
Sanz-Llopis, J., & Ostermann, M. (2020). Innovation in project management through framing and challenge redefinition. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 13 (4), 745-766.
Woolard, N. A. (2018). Rethinking management group projects with the adaptive leadership model: The lesson is the process. Journal of Education for Business, 93 (8), 392-402.
