FORMAL AND INFORMAL ASPECTS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT

There has always been tension between the formal and informal aspects of project management. Formal project management is concerned with the generation and execution of plans; informal project management is concerned with the motivation and coordination of project staff.

Formal Project Management

Formal project management involves project planning as well as project control. Project planning attempts to provide answers to such questions as:

>>Which tasks have to be done?

>>Which tasks must be complete before others can be started?

>>Which skills are needed for the tasks defined?

>>Who is available when and for how much time?

>>How long will the project take, given the people available (i.e., resourcedriven estimating)?

>>How many people are needed to get the project done by a certain date (i.e., date-driven estimating)?

>>How much will the project cost? The questions on estimating time and cost are always difficult to answer; one of the main objectives of process management is to make estimating easier and more reliable.

Project Control Project control deals with executing the project plan and is concerned with regularly (e.g., weekly) answering the following questions:

>>Where does the project stand?

>>Based on this status, when will it be done now?

>>What has been spent so far?

>>Which assignments are critical this week?

>>Who needs help? Project control also deals with coping with such unplanned problems as

>>When employees are pulled off a project, how is the work to be reassigned so that it gets done as soon as possible and as inexpensively as possible?

>>A program was estimated to take 100 hours to complete; 80 hours have already been spent but the program is only halfway through. How does this affect the project deadline?

Informal Project Management

Formal project management can be automated because it makes use of such approaches as critical path analysis. Informal project management is concerned more with intuitive judgment and relationships among personnel. Informal project management tries to answer such questions as:

>>How reliable are an employee’s estimates?

>>A group of programmers is on the critical path this week; how can they be motivated to finish faster?

>>Who needs formal training in which areas, and who needs coaching?

>>What is the state of the team morale? Should anything be done to improve it?

Some of these judgments can be decided with quantitative information. If the history of an employee’s estimates can be accessed as well as the actual time the employee took for each assignment, this information can be used to correct estimates. In this way, formal project management skills can support and improve informal project management, although they are no substitute for intuition and judgment.

People who are proficient at formal project management may not have outstanding interpersonal skills. Similarly, good informal project managers may be impatient with the effort involved in creating plans and revising them as a project unfolds. Formal project management can be learned, and it appears that informal project management cannot — either someone simply is or is not good at it.

Organizations are thus under pressure to find talented informal project managers and to support them with aids for formal project management. Some organizations provide staff to help project managers with project planning and control; automated tools are being used increasingly, but they will be commonplace only if they are easy to use and provide obvious value to the project manager.