How Do You Deal With a Project Whose Members Are Weak at Time Management?

Francis_Wade at PMIIt’s a tough question – how do you cope when you are assigned a team with time management skills that appear to be suspect?

They represent a risk to the success of the project and before you delegate a single task, you want to have an idea of the amount of work that each individual can handle.

In this paper and speech, presented at the Project Management Institute of the Southern Caribbean Chapter, I addressed this question using recent research from Brigitt Claessens. On this page with the materials from the conference, I share the audio, slides and research paper I presented.

It was a great experience presenting to an audience that takes the topic of time management so very seriously.

If you are interested in discussing the topic further, simply visit the forums at my book’s website: simply visit the newly created forums focused on Project Managment at my book’s website.

A Top Site for Effective Project Management

top_site_for_project_managers

Recently I was informed that the home of 2Time Labs was listed as one of the top 100 sites for Effective Project Managers.

It lines up well with some secondary research that we’re doing into the “last mile” of project management.

When I worked at AT&T Bell Labs in the late ’80s-early ’90’s, one of the challenges the company faced was that it was only allowed to connect with customers via the Local Exchange Companies such as NYTEL or Southern Bell. AT&T Employees often complained that these other companies owned “the last mile” and limited what could be offered to the customer in terms of new services.

Well, there’s a “last mile” in project management but it has nothing to do with distance. Instead, it has to do with project failure when a project manager has done a lot of good, hard work that ends up being entirely undone by poor time management skills on the part of team members. In other words, the individuals can’t effectively handle the volume of new time demands that the project places on them.

The fate of the project is entirely out of the hands of the project manager at that point who dutifully hands out tasks to team members and promises to follow-up if he/she hears nothing by pre-determined critical dates.

What are some of the things that project managers can do? Should they do some kind of assessment before a project even starts? Should they try to improve time management skills in the middle of a project? If they ignore the problem, will it go away? What do they do differently when they have completed an assessment?

These issues are worth digging into because (in theory) the Time Management 2.0 approach offers Project Managers an efficient way to evaluate the skills of team members, and effect an improvement by taking small steps.

Whether it holds up in practice remains to be seen, and I’ll be asking this question in the upcoming months to get some definitive answers.

In my soon-to-be-released book there is a critical part of the story when the protagonist / Project Manager, Bill, must lead an ineffective team in terms of time management skills. Or else…

More on the book, and Bill to come, so please stay tuned.