Crescendus™ | Straight Talk on Project Management Execution Project Execution- Dealing with multiple-departmental employees working on a Project. JUNE 2014. | Copyright Crescendus™ 2014. All Rights Reserved.

1. Crescendus™
Practical Brilliance Series
Straight Talk on Project Management Execution
JUNE 2014. | Copyright Crescendus™ 2014. All Rights Reserved.
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Project Execution- Dealing with multiple-departmental employees
working on a Project.
STATUS QUO ISSUES & PROBLEMS:
In most companies, resources from different departments are pooled together or shared to
work on critical projects. During the initial phases of the project, everyone is excited about the
opportunity to collaborate and want to be "in the loop" on everything. The managers, directors
and 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, for
various tasks, leaders are also appropriately assigned but the leaders do not have direct
authority 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 operate
under the matrix structure.
As the year progresses, the above employees keep being pulled into their own intra
departmental activities and tasks governed by their own managers and directors. When this
happens, inter departmental priorities take the back seat and most of the previously agreed
upon timelines are delayed/shifted. This leads to execution frustration and never ending series
of meetings with various stakeholders and political power plays between the departments. The
end result usually follows the " we need to work together" theme and sets off new set of
standing meetings for the rest of the year!
SOLUTIONS:
1. Project Performance & Compensation Reviews- On critical projects, inter departmental team
members 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 team
members.
For example, if a marketing employee is working 80% on core marketing department tasks and
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2. 20% on multi-departmental tasks, the performance review of the 20% portion should be fully
controlled by the project task leader. For this 20%, the original marketing department head
shouldn't be involved in performance review or compensation evaluation. The department
heads 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 the
company and not limited to departments. For critical projects, they should embrace the
concept of annual floating employees that can be pulled into various projects (with different
reporting supervisors) and tasks, depending upon annual strategic goals and priorities. The
Executive Team should direct the HR structure to accomodate the above flexibility.
3. CEO Intervention- Get involved in critical projects and attend critical path initiative project
meetings. Such things can not be delegated simply to your Executives. Use these meetings to
also 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't
forget that we are talking about critical path initiatives that have the potential to severely
impact 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 with
several sub-initiatives that are broken down further into departmental and employee tasks. This
is the most important stage where the CEO should challenge their Executives on Tradeoffs and
restrict core initiatives to a manageable number. We find that most Executives do not like to cut
initiatives because they want to maintain power and control over financial and employee
resources. This is the root cause of all time management issues.
If there is time management problem, challenge and hold your VP's, Directors and Managers
accountable. There is no point pushing the blame to the reporting employees since they do not
have full control on the tradeoffs. During performance reviews, for every time management
challenge 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 any
time. It is better to say that we overestimated our capabilities early in the year and change
course rather than blindly staying the course and hoping for the best (even if you know that it is
wishful thinking).
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