Picking the Busiest People

"A Right Project Team" is one of the key success factors to an IT project. This is what many project management textbooks claim. The maxim is well-understood without ambiguity, but this does not mean it can be realized easily.

Several days ago when I talked to my friends about the challenges of managing projects, we all agreed that the maxim is in fact a delusion. In most cases, a project manager has not much choice in selecting his/her project team-members: There is no "superstar", no one from his/her previous projects, but a group of unrecognized colleagues within the organization for your selection. So before the project manager can build a right project team, first of all, he/she has to choose the "right" candidates.

Apart from reviewing appraisal reports or curriculum vitae of the colleagues, one simple and effective criterion can be adopted for the selection: Take the busiest people as the project team members.

I learned this from a book about six sigma (I forget the name of the book) five or six years ago when I was undertaking my MBA degree. The rationale behind the criterion is very straightforward. In many organizations (especially large enterprises where firing a staff is unusual unless the staff is extraordinary incapable over a long period of time), supervisors or managers tend to avoid assigning tasks to less capable staffs. Instead, they are willing to assign tasks to more capable staffs (capable with regard to productivity, reliability, and obedience). Eventually, those capable staffs will become the busiest colleagues in the organization and they are the best choice to be the project team-members.

Having the right project team-members, of course, does not mean a right project team. There is still a long way to go (the usual HR works of team building like forming, storming, norming and performing...).

Therefore, if you find yourself being treated unfairly (with lots of work compared with your colleagues), you may be the one!