Boundaryless Project Management

The term "boundaryless" has become a buzzword in business for working across department and division boundaries. It is challenging to get people to work this way within a company, but more and more projects cross significant boundaries and require boundaryless project managers.

Here's a common scenario. You are put in charge of a project that has team members in different cities, different companies, even different countries. It may seem like a daunting task, but the world of business is changing from one of direct authority to one of no authority.

Working outside of these boundaries requires special leadership skills based on collaboration, communication, and partnerships. Here are five tips for managing boundaryless projects:

1. Collaborative Planning - Involve all of your team members in the planning. Brainstorm tasks together. Discuss dependencies. Estimate as a team. Working together to agree on how to accomplish your project objective gives everyone a sense of ownership and pride to be part of the team. You will establish your leadership of the team quickly if you demonstrate to the team that each member can help shape the project direction.
   
2. Regular Communication - Set up a regularly scheduled conference call that is at a time suitable for everyone. You may have people calling from several time zones, so be considerate of everyone's business hours. You probably won't have access to everyone's calendars, so use your collaboration skills to plan a suitable meeting time.
   
3. Project Dashboard - Use your regularly scheduled conference call to review a project dashboard that clearly communicates milestones, issues, and action items. Language barriers and phone communication require a visual tool to help guide everyone through the meetings and to give each team member a handout for use between meetings.
   
4. Escalation Path - Although the tips above will help your project succeed, there may still be issues within your project team. It is important to have a clear escalation path for resolving conflict that can't be resolved within the team. Define this before it's needed so that you can turn conflict resolution into a process and keep your project moving forward.
   
5. Occasional Contact - There's nothing like meeting face-to-face with your team members. If your project budget and schedule permit, plan on some travel to bring the team together. Periodic in-person meetings help build teams that are easier to maintain over the phone and through email.
   

If you aren't already managing projects outside of traditional boundaries, you probably will soon. Get ready to develop boundaryless, collaborative leadership skills, and you will be ready to face the project management challenges of the next decade.

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Motivating Project Team Members: Personal Recognition

For project managers who do not have the authority to provide financial recognition to outstanding accomplishments of individual project team members, there's still opportunity to reward and motivate. There are plenty of inexpensive and even free ways to reward your top performers.

Top performers are a rare find. If you have a star performer on your project team, one of your top priorities should be to keep him or her engaged and motivated. When the star of the team is happy about the project and engaged, the rest of the team will be more motivated to give their best.

When you notice a behavior that is above and beyond the average accomplishments of your project team members here are a few ways you can encourage the star:

1. Send an email to the team member noting his or her specific accomplishments and how that has benefited the team. Copy the individual's manager to share in recognizing the accomplishment. A good manager will reward the team member with more trust, more flexibility, more opportunities for career growth, and more incentive pay.
2. Share the accomplishment with the team in a meeting and name the individual and the specific contribution. It may go something like this, "I want to thank Jennifer for going above and beyond by completing development ahead of schedule. Many of you have tasks that depend on this, and this will relieve some of the pressure for you. Great job." Public acknowledgment of positive behavior goes a long way.
3. Celebrate one-on-one. It never hurts to challenge someone that if they do the impossible, you'll owe them a lunch. Many people will work harder just to make you buy them lunch. It's not the lunch that's important. It's the acknowledgment of the challenging task and the willingness to give something of yourself.
4. Give away gift cards. When someone on your project team does something outstanding, be ready with a supply of gift cards. You can pull the individual aside, thank them for their work, and let them know that the gift card is a small token of appreciation for their contribution.
5. Write a hand-written note. In this fast paced email age, people especially appreciate the time and thoughtfulness behind this gesture. A note of thanks or congratulations will often stay in the recipients top drawer for months or even years.
   

One caution with each of these motivators - use them cautiously. It will backfire if you use these ideas to manipulate or if you use them to acknowledge mediocre behavior. Use them wisely, and your team will gladly follow your lead.

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Roles, Ownership, and Accountability

One of the most important factors for a successful project is clear roles and responsibilities.This is important for all projects, but especially for those in which your team has a dotted line relationship to you.

The Confused Project Team
Imagine you are assigned as a member of a project team, and you are not given clear direction about your role or what tasks you own. You may take initiative and create a role for yourself. In this scenario, you may help the project team to be successful. You may also prevent people from doing what they should be doing and create conflict that leads to the project's doom.

Instead of taking initiative, you may sit back and wait for work to be assigned to you. When you are approached about your deliverables, you may reply, "I didn't know you wanted me to..." or "I thought Joe was going to do that." Without clear accountability for tasks your project is again doomed to schedule and cost overruns.

The Organized Project Team
On the other hand, if roles are clearly defined and tasks have assigned owners, then the project team understands what is expected of them. Whether they are go-getters or laggards, they will have a goal to achieve and clear accountability for meeting their deadlines. Project teams like this are refreshing to the team members, since there is a greater sense of fairness.

As the project manager, and not just a team member, you are responsible for defining your team's roles and responsibilities at three levels: 1) project roles; 2) task ownership; and 3) accountability.

Project Roles

Clearly defined project roles help answer the question, "Why am I on this project team?" for each team member. Some people will be assigned to complete certain tasks, others may be responsible for sub-teams that have tasks or deliverables, and still others may be on your team because of the guidance they will provide.

Project roles should be agreed upon by the team members, their direct managers, and yourself. This usually requires communication of the project's purpose, the reason for the assignment of the team member, and the approximate duration of the project. It requires that the person's manager balance priorities and allocate enough time to complete the project tasks.

Don't forget to define the role of the project owner. This individual, often the sponsor of the project, will have the authority to make final decisions about project scope, schedule changes, and budget. As the project manager, you will need to actively manage the project owner's expectations and proactively communicate project status and issues.

Task Ownership

After knowing who is filling which roles in the project team, responsibility for the actual tasks and deliverables must be communicated. This will not be clear at the beginning of the project, but as the work breakdown and schedule are created, team members must be given the opportunity to clarify, expand upon, and challenge any tasks to which they are assigned.

Putting someone's name beside a task on the project plan does not convey ownership of the task to that individual. Many project plans are so long and detailed, that additions and changes are missed if they are not clearly communicated. For best results, create a collaborative environment for creating and maintaining the project schedule. Team members will feel a greater sense of ownership for tasks they have suggested.

Accountability

If you are both the manager of the people on your team and the project manager for the same people, you have great influence on the team members and can hold them accountable. You are also the exception to most organizations today, since organizations are becoming more and more matrixed in project reporting relationships.

In a matrixed project team, you may feel that you have little authority to hold people accountable. Do you need to rely solely on your charm and personal charisma to be successful? Not at all.

You can hold people accountable as long as you have defined project roles and task ownership, as described above. By being clear and up front with the team member and his or her manager on the expectations, duration, and priority of the project, you have created a clear line of accountability for project tasks.

If a team member is not meeting his or her commitments, first go to the individual and find out the reason for the delay. If you do not have the ability to remove obstacles, work with the individual's manager to clarify priorities, add resources, or provide guidance to the individual.

Always approach issues with team member performance as project problems and not personal attacks. Your goal is to be successful in your project by helping your team members to be successful and work through issues together.

Take Aways

Here are some tasks that you can assign to yourself to improve your project management skills:

1. Identify the project owner of a project you are managing or on which you are a team member. How active is the project owner and how strongly does he or she influence the project (positively or negatively)?
2. Look at the projects you are currently managing. Are there tasks you have created but have not clearly communicated at an individual level to the task owners?
3. Reflect on a team member performance issue you have experienced. How would defining project roles, task ownership, and lines of accountability have improved the outcome?

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