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After publishing my previous post about Meaningful Status Reporting I’ve initiated an interesting discussion in focus.com regarding the distinction between a successful project and a successful project manager. The  reason for raising this question is my rather unfortunate experience where I’ve seen project managers completing a project with flying colours, achieving cost, time and technical performance expectations, and receiving all the expected accolades, but leaving behind them a trail of HR disillusionment and dissatisfaction, with team members resigning resulting in substantial loss of precious IP.

So what is your responsibility as a project manager to the short and long term well being of your team members. Does the end justify the means, and is this justification warranted regardless of the human cost involved? Furthermore, who do you morally, ethically and functionally need to satisfy? Clearly you need to keep the customer happy, but when does the cost of satisfying the customer become too high and is there a line you would not cross on the way to achieving that goal?

As you consider your position regarding this issue you might also want to consider the following:

In a recent Harvard Business Review article titled “People Are Not Cogs” the author, Nilofer Merchant, suggests that the language she hears around CIO round tables can be interpreted as if people are cogs. She goes on to say (and this really resonates with me) that “most organizations still operate much as they did in the industrial age. We manage the measurable, rather than the things that create meaning that fuels creativity, that enables innovative thinking and that helps any company to outpace the market”. Nilofer argues that in most organizations there  is consensus that the focus could either be performance OR people based, and that it cannot be based on both. The result of this perception is that most organizations choose to focus on the performance while making a proclamation that the focus on the people will come next. She concludes with the assessment that the proposition of leaving the people ‘thing’ until later is not on as “It’s not the frosting on the cupcake. It’s the key ingredient in how we make the cupcake bigger“.

While the above discussion is made in the context of corporate engagement it is highly relevant to projects as well. Projects, conceptually, are mini-organizations and while they are bound by organizational policies and procedures they can be seen (by the virtue of their temporal existance) as living outside of the organization’s moral, ethical and philosophical boundaries.

While some might look at the above argument with a sense of resentment and alienation, clearly this is far too serious to be ignored. The success of the project is only one of a  number of criteria the organization will be looking to meet, not the least of which is the medium and long term impact the project (and the project manager) have had on staff moral, attitude and retention.

Think about it!

Related posts:

1. Manager Tools – One sure way to become a better manager
2. Letter to a Young Project Manager
3. So you're a manager, but do you do your job?